The GROW Observatory (GROW) will create a sustainable citizen platform and community to generate, share and utilise information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution hitherto not previously considered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil, whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a long-standing challenge for space science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW is highly innovative project leveraging and combining low cost consumer sensing technology, a simple soil test and a large user base of growers and plant enthusiasts to contribute individual soil and land data. It is designed to engage primarily individual growers and small-scale farmers across Europe, and to enable them to develop new wisdom and innovative practices through the collective power of shared and open data and knowledge. Citizens contributing data will gain access to the first single-source comprehensive crop and watering advice service for individual and small-scale growers incorporating scientific and crowdsourced information. Moreover, they will develop ‘campaigns’ (coordinated sampling operations) around local needs and issues, to underpin smarter decision-making and implementation of policy objectives. GROW will actively identify and enable new and credible social and business innovation processes, creating potential new services, applications and markets. The outcome will be a central hub of open knowledge and data created and maintained by growers that will be of value to the citizens themselves as well as specialist communities in science, policy and industry. The GROW partnership will connect and scale to globally dispersed communities linked through digital and social platforms, and a wide range of additional citizen associations and NGOs in sustainable agriculture, gardening, food democracy and land management.

CREATE-IoT’s aim is to stimulate collaboration between IoT initiatives, foster the take up of IoT in Europe and support the development and growth of IoT ecosystems based on open technologies and platforms. This requires synchronisation and alignment on strategic and operational terms through frequent, multi-directional exchanges between the various activities under the IoT Focus Areas (FAs). It also requires cross fertilisation of the various IoT Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) for technological and validation issues of common interest across the various application domains and use cases. CREATE-IoT will align the activities with the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) and will coordinate and support the upcoming LSPs in sustaining the ecosystems developed during those projects through mapping the pilot architecture approaches, address interoperability and standards approaches at technical and semantic levels for object connectivity, protocols, data formats, privacy, security, trusted IoT, open APIs and share the road-mapping with international initiatives. The project will foster the exchange on requirements for legal accompanying measures, development of common methodologies and KPI for design, testing and validation and for success and impact measurement, federation of pilot activities and transfer to other pilot areas, facilitating the access for IoT entrepreneurs/API developers/makers, SMEs, including combination of ICT & Art. CREATE-IoT will build strong connections with Member States' initiatives and other initiatives and will transfer learning points to the broader IoT policy framework that include contractual PPPs (e.g. Big Data, Factories of the Future, 5G-infrastructure), Joint Technology Initiatives (e.g. ECSEL), European Innovation Partnerships (e.g. on Smart Cities) as well as other FAs (e.g. on Autonomous transport). It will also maintain a coordinated working relationship with the parallel CSA that is centere on RRI-SSH.