Applying for NMBP 38-2020 Citizens and industrial technologies (CSA) call

Research Network
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We have joined the consortium building a proposal for the Citizens and industrial technologies call, thanks to @ccotelo. The call is very specific and citizens engagement is at its core.

These are the general objectives of the project:

Bringing together SOCiety and KETs - SOCKET project aims at creating a KET-Citizens ecosystem, guaranteeing Societal Engagement for KETs, not only to enable citizens to better understand the role of industrial and key enabling technologies, but also enabling them as co-creators by contributing with their main needs and concerns.

A practical approach to achieve this purpose will be based on the development of Living Labs at 3 key different dimensions (University-Industry, Citizens–Industry, Industry–Workers) and applied to 2 selected KETs applications focused around Industry 4.0: Advanced Manufacturing, Circular Economy and Eco-innovation. The selection aims to be representative of a wide part of society (academia, manufacturing workers, citizens as consumers…) and to involve KETs applications directly linked to several of the main current societal challenges.

A participatory multi-actor engagement process will be established, presenting practical models of engagement (from previous related projects, know-how and networking with current projects and activities), for bringing together citizens and industry in dialogue and co-creation processes around KETs and industrial technologies applications with the objective of including the citizens priorities, expectations and concerns in their development and implementation.

Project duration is 30 months, the coordinator is EWF and other confirmed partners: FEUGA, University of Vigo, University of Patras - LMS, ENoLL, AIMEN and the Finnish Network of Living Labs. We had the partners call on Wednesday during which we discussed the roles and distribution of the tasks. The proposal is that Edgeryders leads the WP4 - Society KETLab and also having a role in certain tasks in other WPs.

We offer our standard workpackage - we launch the online conversation on the topics of the working groups that will be formed in the WP2 and use the SSNA. The engagement part would consist of different activities for the living labs - workshops for citizens and other stakeholders, creating links between the society and the policymakers, and bringing people to the platform. @nadia would you have some time next week to discuss this and the budget?

By the end of the next week we need to draft the WP description and define the roles of other partners in our WP. The deadline for submission is close, 5th of February, but our methodology fits very well in the proposal and we do not have to invest too much efforts in writing the other sections which will soon be shared with us.

All documents received so far are on our (protected) team Drive and I will be creating the draft of our WP there as well, probably asking some of you for some feedback…if anyone is willing to invest more time with me on this, let me know!

@alberto @hugi @amelia @matthias @johncoate …

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Good work! I can find some time for a meeting next week.

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Yes sure after monday

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Guys, so here’s the deal.

SOCKET is about getting more people to be aware of, and engage with, something called Key Enabling Technologies. You can imagine: IOT, cloud computing, AI (in the sense of Bayesian statistics). Their evolution has profound consequences on our lives, yada yada – and they had the good sense of putting in there references to (1) industry 4.0, i.e. European industrial policy and (2) the circular economy, which can easily be expended into the EU’s Green New Deal.

Citizen engagement with technological development would not be a bad thing. The issue is, there is a reason why people are generally not engaging with this stuff, even less so on EU turf. It’s difficult, technical, fairly boring, we all have better things to do with our lives. In ER, we normally assume that citizen engagement is a scarce resource, that must be paid for in something: normally, power (“I participate in making a decision, the decision then is binding”). Here, there is nothing of the kind. No social contract.

On the other hand, ER and many other spaces are discussing this sort of stuff anyway. Also, the project is small-ish, think 200K (for us), even less. Also, we can try to conjure some kind of social contract, with things like fellowships, residencies etc. etc., as we have done in the past. We can, further, find synergies with other ER activities, such as the SF-ECON Lab. There is even one item where we could deliver some impact, and it is this:

Recommendations and tested activities for citizen engagement in technologies, usable by industry, procurers (such as cities) and other stakeholders

This is up our street, because we are quite opinionated as to how citizen engagement on tech policy should happen. We are also, it seems, considered on the frontier when it comes to participation.

So, I see two possibilities.

  1. We engage with the consortium and support the proposal. We make sure that it does not overpromise, i.e. the promises are realistic. We do a lot of content recycling from NGI, etc. The project, should it win, becomes a nice thing, but we do not allow it to become a threat looming over us because we promised a lot of excitement on relatively little money. It could also be a nice ground for the people who started working with us on the current batch of projects: Maria, Zmorda, Marina herself, with a more hands-off approach from the board.

  2. We admit that we do not have capacity, especially given that we start from an unclear social contract with the project’s future community, and decline their offer.

Thoughts?

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makes sense to me to do 1 with low stakes.

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thanks Nadia, this is basically also our conclusion from the meeting today with Alberto. Would you be up for a short meeting tomorrow or on Thursday?

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thursday works.

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Ok, I have written a document to copy-paste from. It can work to explain what we do in SOCKET, in two pages.

Marina has a WP description which is basically point-for-point our standard WP, with minimal changes.

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