Notes from ICT (HORIZON 2020, November 2013)

Research Network Horizon
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Sessions and areas to focus upon

Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (call on October 2014)

Key person: Fabrizio SESTINI (European Commission, INFSO/E3, Belgium), Loretta Anania Area: Future Internet scenarios with better informed decision-making processes and empower citizens combining methodologies and product (demonstrating applicability)

Scope: Sustainability, participation, collective intelligence, social equality, real problems and communities, bottom up, allow people to cooperate on the open stack with students, hackers, civil society, entrepreneurs…

Community: Propose interdisciplinary projects (ex. Open Budget, Rate corporates) - very interesting, previous projects in https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/node/66639 Horizon: Pilots (STREPS), Multidisciplinary research, three european partners with different capacities

Human-centric Digital age

Key person: Kirsti ALA-MUTKA (DG CONNECT, Belgium), Nicole Dewandre: SSH for the Digital Agenda Area 1 : Social science impact on ICT, ex ICT 1, 2 societal perspectives look for the social scientist, SSH expertise, ICT 31 is the specialised area but it should be everywhere,

Scope: Onlife manifesto, make sense of technology, new issues coming from society, identity, responsibility, attention as a scarce resource, hyperconnectivity, multidisciplenary teams, a way to ensure responsible innovation Sources: Onlife manifesto, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/Contribution_Charles_Ess.pdf

Epistemic responsibility, search engine, argument extraction, research design, data protection regulation do it in a decent way, build things differently, where do we want to get our stories from. Deploy the space, as wells as new concepts

Community: find partners

ICT - enabled public sector innovation (high priority, December 2013)

ICT enabled open government (Innovation action 70%, Coordination and Support, SME Instrument 70% for SMEs doing mobile apps) Key person: Andrea HALMOS (European Commission, DG CNECT, Unit H3, Public Services, Belgium)

Areas: open government as seen through open data, open service, open process - single point of contact, societal challenges 6 - Inclusive society. Also in Automated and dynamic composition of services under Future Internet + Privacy on open government and third party services

Scope: reuse of resources through an open government context, adoption, mobile user friendly services through open data, building on emerging technology in the public sector for futher innovation. Pilots on transparency, participation and engagement third party collaboration for more user friendly mobile personalised services Sources: eParticpation platform EU, vision paper

Community: prepare to propose or participate in project

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Whoa

Hello [Thanasis]. I had managed to miss this post! Where are you in your thinking now, a month later? I don’t quite understand if there is anything you want from the Edgeryders company and community… can you elaborate?

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may be…

Here is an interesting call…

Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective Societies, New forms of innovation, INSO-1-2014/2015: ICT-enabled open government, Research and innovation

Could this be of interest to other Edgeryders ?

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Could be…

… of interest even to Edgeryders LBG (the company) – at least the part about “pilot tools to increase the transparency impact of ICT-based technology platforms of the public sector”. What is your angle? Are you just pointing the community to a call or are you looking for partners for your own application?

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Both

Hi Alberto,

actually I am doing both. I point this to the community as an important call and, also, keep in mind to propose edgeryders, as participants, in a possible call. However, I do not have a specific idea or consortium in mind. If something interesting appears, I will post something asap…

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How can we help?

The the question is simple, [Thanasis]: how can we help?

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Going through the dates and setting up project folders for calls

So the list of all the calls, when they open and when the deadline for submission dates are is now here. I have decided to coordinate two of the calls on behalf of Edgeryders and we already have at least one possible academic partner through [Caroline Paulick-Thiel].

1) Need for shared vision, objective and milestones to guide the work and get us excited enough to really go for it. Some of us including Caroline have had conversations about what is needed for frutiful and generative EU project collaborations to happen.It is a big amount of paperwork and investment of time to submit one application, and often it seems things go wrong in those projects. Also it’s really not mych money so you have to be very creative and efficient in working together.  Against this bakground we agreed it would make sense to identify a general vision, roadmap and objectives for what we want to achieve together, otherwise it is easy to get lost. Then we identify organisations that want to go on that journey with us, and together we map the components in reaching the objectives to different calls. [Noemi] has started this work in the Edgeryders community here. I suggest having a look at this, we can outline something together and then we can ping all the people who want to help with funding applications to a google hangout sometime in early January.

  1. Need for folders with templates for the different required documents and list of concepts and research references. We need to identify what official documents are needed from which organisations, templates for all the different components of an application (dissemination plan, abstract, gannt, budget etc). As well as a list of terminology and the research the designers of calls use to justify their package. I have started  setting up the Edgeryders collaboration infrastructure for a number of calls including the ones you posted above [Thanasis]. Ping me on email so I can give you access to them: nadia at edgeryders dot eu

What do you think?

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Ready to join in mid January

Dear Nadia, dear community, Please include me in the set up and folders for preparation even though I won’t be able to participate actively in anything until the 16.1.2014. Until then I have to finish my thesis and will be offline for a while as well. I hope you understand :wink: Looking forward to the next round of common action! Very kind regards, Caroline

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Count me in!

Dear all,

thank you for posting these interesting calls! The “Human-centric Digital Age” Topic caught my attention right away, since it has a lot in common with my own research.

I have no experience in applying for EU funding so please forgive me if I will at times sound naif. But please count me in,

and, perhaps, somebody give me a hint as to what would be a first step to get things going.

Best, Thomas

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an open call for partnership ?

An idea would be to circulate (to EU fora, commission etc) an open call for partnership, focusing on certain area(s).There, we would describe (let’s say for ICT public sector innovation) Edgeryders’, experience in open governance, how the network actually contributes to ICT enabled public sector innovation, a list of expertise (why partner with Edgeryders) and so on. This should help us identify Edgeryders’ strong points in each area of interest and explain to others why and how partner with the network

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Not a bad idea!

It is completely experimental: I am not aware anyone has done it this way before. I am willing to try it, of course: what would be the point of building Edgeryders if not to do crazy stuff?

But there is an important problem: partner up with Edgeryders to do what? Me personally, I know exactly what I want to do. But in Edgeryders is seen as a corporate shell, maybe different people would like to do different things, and so we could have a call saying “we want to do A, B and possibily C in separate projects. Get in touch if you want to be involved”. This probably work like that: first we word a short document here on the platform as a wiki; then we all push it out through social media.

[ThomasVisCom], what would you like to do in a Euro project? Are you a researcher? An administrator? Would you like to participate with your company or university, or as an individual, Edgeryders-side? I guess everybody involved, not just Thomas, needs to answer these questions…

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Inclusion

The first thing that I liked about edgeyders (the idea of it , anyways) is the 100% Inclusion policy. For me, this is where it all starts.

Yes, I’m a researcher, i’m in the final stages of my PhD in the field of artistic research /media studies, but I don’t like the idea that this excludes me from everything else. So, the edgeryder “shell”, as you call it, could be exactly this: A platform that connects people and expertise that could’nt be more diverse, even contradictory, if you will. But there’s the common desire to build something: our future. Not being satisfied with having to chose between  A, B or C. That’s the multiple choice education that has led us to the state we’re in. We can say: “None of the above”, or “all inclusive”. I think it also becomes clear in the “shared vision” discussion, that there’s a need for adressing the body issue. We don’t want to exclude our body from our minds, as “disembodied” technology is neglecting basic human needs and the diachronic nature of our lives. The EU commission is sending out newsletters bragging about their “inclusion” policies. European Commission » Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion . What do they actually mean by that? Edgeryders could be a a model organisation for a new “Human centric Digital Age”, defying  the logic of the actual “matrix” scheme, where human beings are reduced to mere resources in an economy that is not made to serve them, but instead some abstract “growth” figures.

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Understood…

… but we still need to specify what we want to do in any project, what the project is about. And this “what” needs to be consistent with what the call is asking. It seems to me that this thread (at least, the part that interests me most) is about NEW FORMS OF INNOVATION (I know, I know), specifically sub-objective II (maybe you were more interested in the “Inclusion” call mentioned in [Thanasis]'s initial post?).

Once decided what to do, you build a team which is inclusive in the sense that it does not care for formal qualifications, but which still must contain the skills that help carry the project to completion. Which is why I am asking what you would like to do!

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I don’t know (yet)

what to do, or better, I think that the specifics will emerge, and Innovation is a messy process, anyways. The “new forms of Innovation” as imbecile as the  sounds, will have to go beyond producing gadgets, probably that is what they mean by “new forms”. Now, what I do know, is that it will be about inclusion, yes, and the EU commissions perspective on the issue is mostly that exclusion is caused by unemployment, poverty and poor education. I would suggest that, whenever somebody or something is excluded, the main reason is that the “mainstream” wants to exclude certain groups of people because they don’t know how to handle them, and they experience “cognitive dissonance” when they are confronted with “otherness”, people who live on the street and not in homes, people who -temporarily - don’t work, or people who do work that doesn’t look like work, or whatever. From this kind of exclusion, it is sometimes a small step to criminalization, as recent events in Hungary show:

I think, a first step would be to reframe completely what we consider exclusion. We can see ourselves as excluded from them, which means, we can desire to live like they do, and see what it feels like: Live on the streets, live without money: Is there anything to be learned from them? I think there is, actually, there’s a lot to be learned. So, to be a bit more practical (as you very politely insist us to be, rightly so, Alberto), I would suggest to create a learning platform: “The academy of the excluded” What can we learn from them? Who wants to get on board of this “Think Tank of the excluded” ?

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Not a bad idea!

… and one right up the Edgeryders street. I think it is safe to say that this is credible, as long as you ([ThomasVisCom]) take the lead! Because specifics don’t just “emerge”: they require lots of love and hard work. In the context of EU projects, then specifics are not just a nice writeup, but budgets, Gantt charts, partnership negotiations, the whole package.