Outreach and engagement specifications for POPREBEL and NGI Forward

[anique.yael]

Further to our meeting in September, may I (finally ) share some specifications for you @nadia in your strategy and planning for the outreach and engagement deliverables on POPREBEL and NGI Forward. You’ve said that you intend on shaping an umbrella engagement campaign for both projects, so I’ll be framing this brief with that in mind.

It covers:

• framing
• POPREBEL engagement task/s
• POPREBEL project wide engagement considerations
• NGI engagement task/s
• NGI Forward project wide engagement considerations
• communications
• project planning and reporting
• recruitment and budget.

Collaborating to deliver and strategic considerations

As discussed, the project management team is here as an interface between the European Commission, our consortia partners and you to support in delivery of the best possible work packages we can. Unlike some of the other tasks, engagement calls for particularly close communication and mutual support between you @nadia and I because of the role it plays in Edgeryders’ Research Network strategic positioning. We have agreed in distinguishing between engagement to bring people into the conversation - @nadia, and stakeholder relations involved in Research Network development - myself.

Based on this, I wanted to reassure you that I am here to make sure your expertise and talent are free to lead your engagement activities as you see fit. I also ask for your understanding in my stewardship of our presence in EU research and innovation stakeholder relations and you’ll see below, this will cover sector building, strategy and communications, which we’ll both touch on. To be specific, I will continue to build relationships for Edgeryders’ Research Network with Horizon2020 stakeholders and the Commission, while also contributing to project-wide engagement activities including leading Edgeryders involvement in the following tasks:

T.1.3 :Topic co-occurrence analysis: where do technology and social issues meet? with @alberto
T2.6: Knowledge transfer into consultation platform
T3.1: NGI Topics: Future scenarios
T3.6 Developing a shared vision for the NGI
T4.6 National contact point & FIF coordination
T5.4 NGI Visions Book

Which is a fine segue way to the juicey stuff and addressing your questions from our meeting!

Framing

Based on the success of your work in the past, engagement in both projects was framed in the almost the same way as you’ve lead it previously. We are grateful that you are willing to continue to collaborate on these projects and understand that this is being done alongside other professional activities. Let’s make sure that we keep our communication channels open to support wellbeing as a priority in delivery of this work.

In line with this, there are no deliverables under the engagement tasks and only milestones for the onboarding workshops to be finished by the end of the second year on both projects (this lightens pressure and reporting demands from the Commission). However, you will be required to contribute to project-wide periodic reporting as well as the Consultation Insights report in NGI Forward. Please also note that as mentioned elsewhere the Impact Summit/ Conference sits in other work packages in both projects – in POPREBEL being lead by UCL – and is a milestone in POPREBEL while a deliverable in NGI Forward (more below).

By now you’ve read the proposals and are across their objectives. The main thing I’d like to foreground is that POPREBEL is a Research and Innovation Action while NGI Forward is a Coordination and Support Action, so their expected impacts are different. From the call, POPREBEL is expected to “enhance the knowledge base on populism in comparative and historical perspective. It will develop indicators as well as medium to long-term scenarios on the consequences of populism, which will support policies, narrative construction and other actions to address the phenomenon.” While also from the call, for NGI Forward: the whole initiative is expected to “…Shape a more human-centric evolution of the Internet; Create a European ecosystem of top researchers, hi-tech startups and SMEs with the capacity to set the course of Internet evolution; Generate new business opportunities and new Internet companies with maximum growth and impact chances, notably through the creation of startups and their scaling up in Europe…;” while NGI Forward as the technology policy and strategy CSA is specifically expected to enable “European research and innovation leaders driving the debate for a human-centric Internet research and policy strategy.”

You made a sound point in our meeting; namely the opportunity to work out loud on the hypothesis of which the project’s research is validating so participants can discuss it in a specific format; a kind of “participatory reframing of research questions” in your words. I have been advocating that all consortium planning and comms happen on the platform to keep partners there as much as possible to support this working out loud. This is going ahead. What’s more, you will be able to highlight this and your engagement approaches further at both project kick off meetings in January.

Considerations

Considering the symbiotic relationship between engagement and community management, @noemi and @johncoate have requested a session to work through how the community management and engagement tasks interweave. I agree that this will be of great value in making sure the boundaries between tasks can also act as interfaces. I propose it happens before you finalise your engagement plan - let’s arrange it in the riot channel.

Please also note that the Culture Squad lead by @natalia @alex_levene and @noemi have and are preparing proposals around REBELVillage that feeds into POPREBEL. This is clearly a great engagement opportunity and also calls for consideration around messaging and impact.

POPREBEL engagement task (WP 2 Online conversations) + Impact conference task

Project Abstract

POPREBEL is an inter-disciplinary consortium of researchers focused on explaining and contextualising the recent rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). While populism is a phenomenon that has by now emerged in almost every democracy, we believe that regional and cultural-historical dimensions need to be considered in order to improve not only scholarly knowledge, but also policy recommendations. It is urgent for Western Europeans to look into the CEE mirror, just as it is urgent for the CEE region to understand itself. To this end, we will create a typology of populism’s various manifestations, reconstruct trajectories of its growth and decline, investigate its causes, interpret its meanings, diagnose its consequences, and propose policy solutions.
Our focus is on CEE, but we engage in comparisons with populisms elsewhere, particularly Western Europe. While scholars from different disciplines have looked at populism, we argue that the full potential of interdisciplinary research has not been achieved yet. We draw on data and models from various disciplines and combine them into a rich study of forces at play. In addition to established methods of economics, sociology, and cultural studies, at the heart of our approach is a novel methodology whose essence is a large-scale, Europe-wide, multi-lingual online conversation. This is a listening exercise; its aim is a deep understanding of everyday life in Europe challenged by the rise of populism. The method to process this unique ethnographic material is semantic social network analysis. POPREBEL relies on foresight/future studies, deep involvement with activists, policy makers, and civil society actors to boost the immune system of European democracy. We develop scenarios and share them with all interested parties to reflect, in public debate, on how well they fit both in the CEE region and the rest of Europe. Our focus is not just scholarly; the project serves as a platform for mutual learning.

As we’ve discussed already and has been mentioned elsewhere:

@anique.yael

A very important note that Jan and Richard were explicit about is that we need to be very sensitive about the visibility of our POPREBEL work in some of these countries, particularly Hungary. … So it is important for the safety and security of our partners and collaborating publics that we keep a low profile in certain contexts. I’ll be bringing this up with @nadia on engagement and suspect we can come up with some kind of political sensitivity/ visibility internal policy wiki of sorts.

A recap on the exact requirements associated to the task you’re leading in POPREBEL from the Description of Action in the Grant Agreement (an updated version of the proposal; herein referred to as the DOA of the GA):

Task 2.2 - Recruit and engage participants

Objectives of T2.2
● Establish and maintain social media presence across the project’s four languages. Use it to disseminate interesting content coming from the platform. This directs traffic back to it, and drives signups. Goal: 2-400 hundred unique participants, 2-5,000 forum posts.
● Run offline events to reach out to less web-savvy strata of the population and elicit new stories and contribution to report back to the platform. Goal: 12 offline events/workshops in the Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia and the rest of Europe.

Description of work and role of participants
Task 2.2 (Involved: EDGERYDERS)
● We create POPREBEL accounts on the main social media. These are: Facebook (highest penetration all across the EU, except Estonia and Latvia), Instagram and Twitter (ranking second in most of CEE and most of Western Europe respectively). Use them to reach into the social media conversation across POPREBEL languages, sharing interesting content from the platform (starting from the “community journalism” seed posts) and drawing traffic back to the POPREBEL platform.
● We design, organize and run 12 onboarding events, aimed at collecting stories of lived populism. The word “populism” will be with caution, as it has negative connotations in some cultures, and might discourage supporters of the populist agenda. We partner with local organizations to take advantage of their networks. We report faithfully such experiences on the platform, re-share them on social media, which should drive further engagement and so on.
● We participate into third-party events like conferences, political rallies, and other grassroots events. This is both a way to study populist tactics and strategies in action, and a technique to raise awareness around POPREBEL and recruit
new members.

The milestone associated to this Task:
MS7: On-boarding workshops delivered.
By month 24 (ie. December 2020).
The means of verification: 12 onboarding workshops delivered.

The Impact conference

The impact conference will be lead by UCL with our curatorial leadership and is written in as a task in the WP7:

Task 7.5: Impact conference
A final impact conference, targeting not only academics, but also – and especially – activists, politicians, journalists. Comparing notes, learning from each other, with POPREBEL functioning as a way to find and systematize the existing experiences. This is meant to boost the immune system of Europe’s democracy by giving extra tools to the people in its frontline (EDGERYDERS - as per Section 2.2 of Annex 1, Part B).

It is listed as a milestone for month 33.

POPREBEL project wide engagement

Your question: which activities are tied to other tasks and partners and how do we insulate the work so we can get results regardless of others?

I quote from p32 – 33 of the DOA of the GA that summarises well all of the communication and engagement activities in a digestible way:

Our communication and dissemination strategy outlined here is only the starting point and serves as a preliminary blueprint that will guide us as we seek to reach the maximum possible outreach to academic, policy-making, civil society and public circles within the EU and beyond. The detailed dissemination plan will be thoroughly discussed at the kickoff meeting and will be subject to further refinement at each consortium meeting. The overall objective of the strategy is to ensure that the research activities and findings of the participating researchers enjoy maximum visibility, multimedia
versatility as well as use and engagement by a range of relevant audiences and stakeholders. Our guiding principles and the rationale for the dissemination strategy are the following:

1. Stakeholders will not only be treated as dissemination targets but will also engage early on in the design and content of the research in order to achieve maximum policy relevance and use of the results.
2. Communication activities will draw on the networks of the beneficiaries – at the local, national, European and international levels as well as with reference to specific sectors – to ensure the most targeted and effective outreach to different stakeholder groups at the most appropriate level.
3. Multimedia and social media afford new opportunities to present, disseminate and engage in research. We are committed to taking full advantage of these opportunities in a strategic way, not by adding to information overload and embracing novelty for its own sake, but by carefully reviewing and selecting new tools and channels in view of the specific dissemination audience and purpose.

In order to disseminate the project results as broadly as possible both during the project and after its completion, the communication strategy of POPREBEL will include the following measures:

1. Provide a communication platform for the consortium that makes it easy for all partners to communicate with each other and to engage with policy-makers, targeted practitioners and other stakeholders. The website will be an interactive means of profiling, disseminating and discussing results and publications. The platform will host the following:
   a. Working papers, thought pieces, open-access academic articles and policy papers
   b. Video clips (in the form of bite-size vignettes) of researchers explaining their findings
   c. Interactive blog posts, written by the POPREBEL researchers
   d. Links to the project Facebook site and Twitter account
   e. General information in multiple languages on different aspect of populism, linking to the websites of the organisations of our academic beneficiaries and partner organisations.
2. Organise a research roadshow, whereby groups of POPREBEL researchers will visit specific CEE cities and organise a series of events aimed at different target audiences, i.e. workshops for anti-populism activists, advisory meetings with local politicians, seminars with academics and students, etc.
3. Publish work highlighting the synergies between the various projects by means of at least 1 edited book and 1 special journal issue in addition to numerous individual articles and research reports, which will be available via open access (gold model). This includes policy briefs and papers on different WP topics, highlighting the objectives of the
   research, the scientific approach and methodology with the new knowledge produced within the programme and identifying key messages for POPREBEL’s target groups. In addition to being uploaded to the project’s website, all policy briefs and publications will be disseminated via other platforms available to our consortium, while all researchers will send publications to their respective networks.
4. Use multimedia and data visualisation tools as well as social network tools – including Facebook, Twitter and video clips – to make research findings accessible in the most engaging ways for activists and the broader public and ensure that lessons learned are widely debated and circulated. We will use a selected set of research outputs that are conducive to multimedia representation and appeal to a broader audience and produce in conjunction with the authors engaging
   data visualisations, audio-visual packages and interactive multimedia representations tailored to specific target audiences (all available on the POPREBEL website). This set of visually engaging and multimedia-enhanced materials will document key research findings, including a podcast author interview series and online data platform
   that allows users to interactively visualise and explore some of the datasets and case studies generated.
5. Convene panels and roundtables at academic conferences (e.g. BASEES and ASEEES). In addition, individual researchers will promote their findings of the POPREBEL project at national and international workshops and conferences. At the end of the project, we will hold an academic conference at one of the partner universities.
6. Convene a series of research-to-policy workshops to facilitate essential face-to-face communication and discussion of results between academics and policy makers and lay the foundation for policy impact. These workshops will be organised in cooperation with our partner organisations. All the workshops and stakeholder conference will allow for the exchange of information and discussion between researchers, civil society activists, political and economic actors and members of the public.
7. Organise a final impact conference, to socialize knowledge about how different public policies and political tactics can boost the immune system of European democracy (T 7.5, MS14)
8. Publish op-eds, articles in national and international print media and relevant blogs, such as the Freedom House Blog. It is the intention of the project to encourage the publication of short articles, commentaries or essays in national and international print and online media during the lifecycle of the project. Both academic and non-academic partners will make use of their existing connections to newspapers for that purpose.
9. Influence the current academic debate on populism in order to make it more responsive to policymakers and practitioners’ needs and inform evidence-based programmes with measurable impact by exploiting the channels provided by our partner organisations, which have links with national and EU legislative bodies.

Associated Tasks and Work Packages

In particular, it’s worthwhile noting that WP3: Culture is directly using the conversation as their core research corpus, and we are in dialogue about WP5: Economics to also.

WP6: FORESIGHT SCENARIOS

This work package lead by our fellow Estonians at UTartu includes three tasks of engagement seminars that I mentioned in our meeting. Vello our partner there is interested in working together to make sure we’re aligned in the strategies.

The central task of this WP will be to develop a foresight dimension for the POPREBEL programme, putting together a series of analytical scenarios based on the collected input from the other WPs and their studies of populism in Eastern Europe. The scenarios will be sensitive to different forms of the populist phenomenon, and interrelate them to different societal, technological, political and economic evolutions (drivers) that may come to pass. A second stage of the WP, in collaboration with WP 7, will be to engage three specific target groups – scholars, policy-makers and members of the public – in a structured discussion of these scenarios. These engagement seminars will not only appraise the completeness of the scenarios, but more importantly they will elicit specific reactions to how leaders and society should
react to different futures. In so doing, we will gain a better appreciation for the kinds of responses that may be needed depending on the confluence of events. The WP will prepare materials and develop strategies for dissemination of results and policy recommendations, in particular on the measures to be undertaken in order to boost awareness about the future stakes of populism and democratic resilience. Our dissemination and communication activities are organised in WP7.

The relevant tasks are:
Task 6.2 - Preparation of an engagement seminar with academics, policy-analysts, journalists
Task 6.3: Preparation of an engagement seminars with politicians and policy-makers
Task 6.4 - Preparation of an engagement seminars with members of the public

WP7: COMMUNICATION AND DISSEMINATION

Lead by UCL, the Impact Summit sits in this WP and it is also where we’ll be working closely with them on communications messaging and delivery.

Since POPREBEL is designed for maximum impact and immediate policy relevance, the communication and dissemination strategies are at its heart. Therefore, we devote to them Sections 2.2a and 2.2.b of Annex 1, Part B. Here we summarize our main objectives.
WP7 aims to ensure that the research activities, findings, original methods of civic engagement and policy
recommendations prepared by the consortium enjoy maximum visibility, multimedia versatility as well as use and engagement by a range of relevant audiences. The specific objectives of the work package are:
● Formulate a joint dissemination strategy. It will be refined over the course of the project based on the feedback from target audiences;
● Provide a platform for the consortium that makes it easy to engage policy-makers, targeted practitioners and other stakeholders to profile, disseminate and put to discussion results and publications;
● Use academic research findings for making feasible policy recommendations;
● Fully harness multimedia and data visualisation tools to communicate the research findings in engaging ways;
● Convene a series of workshops, a research road-show and conference for different target audiences to facilitate essential face-to-face communication and discussion of results and to lay the foundations for policy impact and deeper policy to research dialogue in the future.

ETHICS AND IMPACT PLAN

It will vital that you work closely with our Advisory Board for Ethics and Impact on the Edgeryders Ethics and Impact Plan, and its implementation. It is a deliverable at month 2 as follows.

D8.3 : Edgeryders Ethics and Impact plan [2]
First draft of ethics and impact plan specific to WP2 and Edgeryders methodology (reference Section 5 of Annex 1 - Part B) in place and accessible as agile wiki.

And from our section on ethics:

Advisory Board for Ethics and Impact

1. EDGERYDERS appoints an Advisory Board for Ethics and Impact to obtain independent peer reviewing of the practices proposed within the project as it develops. Its members are:
   a. Dr Marco Manca, a medical doctor (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mmanca). He is Senior Research Fellow at CERN and co-founder of ScImpulse Foundation. He leads the ethics section at OPENCARE
   (https://opencare.cc), a project that was applauded by reviewers for its highly advanced ethical stance.
   b. Dr Alberto Alemanno, a legal scholar (he is Jean Monnet Chair for EU law at HEC Paris), and a civil society activist operating at a European level (founder of The Good Lobby: http://thegoodlobby.eu/ ).
2. Working with the ABEI, we produce a detailed and clear ‘consent funnel’, replacing the traditional (and ethically ineffective) ‘I accept the Terms and Conditions’ box to tick. A consent funnel is a gateway to the platform where participants can consent to sharing and handling of their information for the purpose of the project, inspired to the principles of honesty and transparency of the Portable Legal Consent (http://sagebase.org/e-consent). The idea is that the platform asks first-time users questions aimed at making sure they understand that they are in a public space for debate and should not reveal personal information unless they are comfortable with it being public. Users are not allowed to post until they get the questions right.
3. The rules for access to all data, the mechanisms of protection, and the risks that entails from technical incompleteness (even with best practice) are disclosed in natural and clearly understandable language, with easy to get pointer to the mechanisms to opt in and out at any time.

NGI Forward engagement task (WP 2 Collective Intelligence) + Impact Summit

Project Abstract

NGI Forward brings together a consortium of leading organisations in the NGI and the internet space more broadly to help further the Next Generation Internet as the key European entity and space for radical new thinking on the future internet, by both conducting and bringing together the latest thinking and cutting edge research, and reaching a critical mass of Europeans through our ambitious engagement strategies.
Our main aim is to articulate an ambitious vision for what we want the Next Generation Internet to be, involving diverse voices in the process. We set out a clear set of next steps towards this vision through the development of technology, value and policy roadmaps, and build a network of the key European stakeholders we need to empower in order to achieve these goals.
Employing cutting-edge data methodologies we continuously identify newly emerging technologies, social issues and communities likely to play a key role in the shaping of the future internet. Understanding these emerging dynamics allows us, and by extension the European Commission, to become involved in shaping their development early on, embedding key values for the Next Generation Internet in the process.
We build a strong and vibrant community of key stakeholders (innovators, researchers, policymakers and the general public) surrounding these topics to drive forward the NGI, involving both leading internet thinkers and well established innovators, as well as young talent and otherwise untapped talent pools. Through leading edge qualitative and quantitative research (such deep learning, ethnography and futures methodologies), we map out the main research and policy needs and opportunities surrounding these topics, empowering our stakeholders group to take action.

And now the same for NGI Forward - a recap on the exact requirements associated to the task you’re leading, from the DOA of the GA):

T2.3:Recruit and engage stakeholders [M4-M36]
Partner(s): Edgeryders (Task leader), ALL
Motivation for the task: To build an active, smart, vibrant community of NGI experts through a targeted, accessible and inclusive outreach and sensemaking campaign to bring our stakeholder communities into the conversation and activities.
It funnels recruits into the online conversation of T2.1, which provides the activities of this task with a natural channel for follow-up.
Work plan: We devise an ambitious engagement strategy to help attract users to the platform and to turn them into frequent participants in debates. We design, organise and run 12 onboarding events across Europe, aimed at collecting perspectives on NGI and bringing a broader stakeholder base into the project. These offline events are primarily aimed at reaching out to less web-savvy
strata of the population and eliciting new stories and contributions to report back to the platform, collaborate withexisting events ensuring conversations can continue online, and maintain an active presence across leading conferences and smaller fringe community events across Europe. We partner with local organizations to take advantage of their networks. This centres around recruiting and appointing four ambassadors with strong links in civic communities to undertake targeted and credible engagement their respective networks. We are aiming to have an online consultation platform of approximately 1000 active participant-informants by the end of the project.
Partners role: This task is led by Edgeryders, but will also rely on the support from all other partners to draw in new participants and feed into and foster debates on the platform.
Relationship with other tasks: Stakeholders will flow from other engagement activities across work packages, and from the data-driven stakeholder mapping exercises in WP1 and WP2 into the platform. Similarly, we will recruit event participants and key stakeholders through their contributions to the platform.

The milestone associated to this Task:
MS5: 12 onboarding workshops delivered
By month 24 (ie. December 2020).
Means of verification: Final consultation platform onboarding workshop delivered.

Impact Summit

The Impact Summit is written in as a task in WP4: NGI Ecosystem Engagement. Indeed this is a key work package associated to your engagement strategies as further outlined below.

T4.2 Impact summit [M30-36]
Partner(s): Edgeryders (Task lead), Resonance Design, Nesta, Aarhus University
Motivation for the task: This is the final capstone event of the whole project, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders to reflect on progress made so far, learn from each other and highlight best practice solutions, we will help strengthen the community and provide participants with the knowledge and practices they need to effectively continue to create a human centric and democratic NGI.
Work plan: We convene a final Impact Summit in M34 of the project targeting the cross section of the project’s communities including researchers, innovators, activists, public administrators and policy makers, industry journalists
and community leaders. Ambassadors from WP2, and selected NGI influencers will be engaged to curate a dynamic program, incorporating key points of debate and insights into participatory activities that produce co-designed tools and pathways forward. Goal: 1 three day conference with 300-350 active attendees and report.
Partners roles: This task will be led by Edgeryders, with additional support from Aarhus University, Nesta and Resonance Design.
Relationship with other tasks: The Impact Summit will bring together the dialogue, insights and multidisciplinary group of internet stakeholders mobilised across WP2, 3 and 4. Tools emerging from the Summit will be incorporated into WP5 communications, dissemination and the NGI Visions Book (T5.4).

The deliverable associated to this Task

D4.2 : Impact Summit [34]
Final flagship event, bringing together representatives from all our key stakeholder groups.

NGI Forward project wide engagement

Your question: which activities are tied to other tasks and partners and how do we insulate the work so we can get results regardless of others?

As mentioned, our engagement strategy is one part of an interdisciplinary and consortium wide events and consultation one. I invite you to review pp 22 – 27 in the DOA for a full overview of events and communications and include below the summary of the events strategy for ease of reference:

2.2.2 An Ambitious and Cohesive Events Strategy
Bringing together our stakeholders through events is a key component of NG Forward- indeed,
throughout the project, we will organise at least eighty events in over twenty European member
states (and beyond the EU as well). The events we organise range in scope from informal meetups to large-scale summits, and target a variety of different audiences. These events will not only serve as communication and dissemination tools but also play an important role in generating and validating project outputs, engage existing and new stakeholders and strengthening the NGI ecosystem across Europe.
To ensure cohesion between these activities and correct branding (and information sharing) across the different events, we have developed a taxonomy explaining the differences between each type.
The table below only includes events directly organised by the consortium. We will work in close
collaboration with the National Contact Points and FIF networks to support local workshops in
member states and ensure learnings flow back into our work streams, as well as with the other
projects funded under the NGI umbrella to ensure we align missions and dates, and collaborate
where possible.
Event types
Informal meet-ups:
Goal: Informal local NGI ecosystem building and locating potential NGI ambassadors and Award material.
Size: This can differ significantly based on the nature of each meetup, but usually below 40.
Audience: General audience, members of thematic meetup groups
How many: 25+ throughout the project, this number is likely to increase as we are keen to work
Examples: The roundtable help by Resonance Design at the ThingsCon meetup is an example of aligning NGI material in and with an existing conference (in this case Europe’s leading conference about the future of hardware, connected devices and Internet of Things (IoT)).
Salons:
Goal: Formal regional and national NGI ecosystem building in close co-operation with NCP, business alliances and civil society.
Size: Capped at 30 participants (invite-only) to give everyone the opportunity to meaningfully contribute.
Audience: National government, NCP, business community, startup community, civil society, artists, designers.
How many: 20+ throughout the project
Examples: Previous salons held by NGI Move were held in: Ljubljana, Brussels, Warsaw, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bled, Berlin, and Podgorica.
Method-focused and outreach workshops:
Goal: The workshops either serve to finetune NGI topics for upcoming work programmes, to build anticipatory regulation alignment between various levels of government, inform about upcoming calls and strengthen local NGI ecosystems.
Size: Between 20 and 50 participants
Audience: Experts in subject matter, NGI stakeholders, Regulatory bodies, citizens.
How many: 24 events.
Examples:
● Four co-creation workshops where we will collaboratively design a future-facing policy toolkit.
● Two research needs identification workshops: to be held at leading academic
conferences, bringing together leading internet researchers to set out their needs.
● 12 on-boarding workshops to engage interested citizens and edge-of-centre experts in the
NGI Forward online platform
● Six matchmaking webinars helping find stakeholders find like-minded organisations to work
with (particularly targeted at open NGI funding calls).
Flagship events:
Goal: These are the largest events we organise, and are focused on bringing together our larger
stakeholder networks.
Size: At least a 100+
Audience: Each of the flagship events targets a specific core stakeholder group (general public,
innovators, researchers and policymakers), with the impact summit bringing all together in one final event.
How many: We organise 10 flagship events throughout the project.
Examples: Four public town halls, three innovation summits, two policy & research summits and one final impact summit.
We will harness our strong existing networks to collaborate with existing conferences and networks. Resonance Design is a media and knowledge partner at the IOT Council. Through this partnership, the consortium can propose and plan panels and speakers at any given moment. The IoT Council organises over 200 events per year related to NGI hot topics such as Big Data, AI, Blockchain, IoT, IT and Cybersecurity. Other important events and conferences on our radars: Re:Publica, CCC, FOSDEM, Transmediale, OuiShare, Mozfest, 4YFN, Quadrature du Net, IGF, ICANN, MakerFaire, etc.
As a consortium we have an excellent track record organising ambitious events at various scales. In the current cycle of NGI projects alone, both NGIMove and Engineroom have organised several successful events bringing together leading internet thinkers, such as the launch of the NGI Awards at the 4YFN conference, the Reimagining the Internet event at Nesta in February which brought together over a 180 participants (including many high level internet stakeholders), hosted salons and co-creation workshops in collaboration with leading MEPs like Marietje Schaake and Eva Kaili, and are in the process of organising five dedicated NGI sessions at Nesta’s FutureFest festival, which will involve leading thinkers in the internet space such as Evgeny Morozov, Manuel Castells, Aral Balkan, Francesca Bria, Imogen Heap, Angela Nagle and Chelsea Manning.

In our own WP, this Task is particularly relevant to your engagement activities, and of course those of @johncoate and @noemi in community management.

T2.6: Knowledge transfer into consultation platform [M4-M36]
Partner(s): Edgeryders (Task leader), DELab, Aarhus, Nesta, Resonance Design
Motivation for the task: To make sure we foster interesting and meaningful debates on the platform, and give stakeholders the opportunity to reflect on the research and output generated under the banner of NGI Forward, each partner will be tasked with turning their deliverables and other findings into easy to digest and debate conversations starters. Reflections and comments from stakeholders on the platform will furthermore flow back into the other tasks, allowing us to learn and iterate upon this feedback.
Work plan: Every time we generate a substantial new piece of research or thinking, we will commit to turning this into piecemeal conversation starters to be used as conversation starters on the platform. Focus here will be on generating engaging content, not just summaries. From events, we engage proven offline-online documentation methods to create
short video testimonials and main points of contention surfaced during panel discussions. From our data research, we focus on identifying the most thought-provoking stories and sharing interactive data visualisations.
Partners role: This task will be led by Edgeryders and DELab, with significant support from Aarhus, Nesta, Amsterdam and Resonance Design.
Relationship with other tasks: This task relies on outputs and content being generated by all other work packages.

WP3: POLICY AND TECHNOLOGY ROADMAPS

This work package is lead by Nesta and involves Edgeryders in two tasks. These are the tasks I’ve written myself into and are relevant to your engagement work, particularly in terms of where the conversations will be leading.

Objectives:
The core aim of this work package is to explore possible NGI futures, articulating an ambitious vision for a more humancentric and democratic future internet and articulating the policy approaches we would need to bring us closer to this possible future. To do this effectively, we have set ourselves the following sub-objectives:
● By building scenarios on different possible futures of the core NGI Topics using cutting-edge futures methodologies, these scenarios will help inform the creation of policy and technology roadmaps and allow us to articulate policy frameworks that remain fit for purpose across a range of possible futures outcomes.
● We develop a toolkit enabling policymakers to use co-creation and other methodologies to design internet policy following such an anticipatory regulation approach, enabling European policymakers to operate at the forefront of future-fit policymaking.
● The NGI can only be a success if we have buy-in from policymakers at different levels of governance. We therefore collaboratively come up with a NGI policy agenda and accompanying manifesto with concrete policy recommendations we urge policymaking bodies to sign onto.
● We convene a community of radical policymakers seeking to build a more human-centric internet to share best practices and learnings, and take collective action. This community will be spearheaded by the City of Amsterdam, afrontrunner in this space.

The two tasks Edgeryders is involved in are:
T3.1: NGI Topics: Future scenarios [M3-M31]
T3.6 Developing a shared vision for the NGI [M7-M36]

You can review the whole work package on pp21 – 23 in the DOA.

WP4: NGI ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

In WP4, we lead the Impact Summit and are listed as partners on three associate tasks…

Every task in WP4 – lead by Resonance Design (our friend Rob van Kranenburg) - is directly relevant and significant for consideration in your strategy. Three of them include Edgeryders as collaborating partners. You and I need to get clear on how these tasks feed into your engagement strategy and likewise with my own role in stakeholder relations, topic identification and policy and technology roadmaps across the project.

The main aim of this work package is to bring together the core offline stakeholder engagement activities and flagship events, NGI Awards, mobilisation of new actors and collaboration across key NGI stakeholders. This work package is of crucial importance for building the kind of strong interdisciplinary networks we need to foster in order to position Europe as a global leader in a more human-centric internet with values like inclusiveness, resilience and openness and its core. 2 policy and research summits and 3 innovation summits will be organised, with the project culminating in an impact summit [pulling all of this together] flagship event, NGI Awards, mobilisation of new actors and collaboration across key NGI stakeholders.
To do this, we set ourselves the following objectives:
● We organise informal meetups, salons and flagship events all over Europe. It is important that the Next Generation Internet is a diverse and inclusive initiative, so we expand our reach to cities and locations beyond the usual suspects.
● To help scale and strengthen ambitious policy initiatives that could help further the objectives of the NGI, we bring together policymakers, innovation leaders and the research community from across member states to share best practices and empower them to take take collective action through the creation of a vibrant online network of engaged stakeholders.

It is made up of five tasks as follows:
T4.1 Meetups and salons throughout all of Europe (Resonance)
T4.2 Impact Summit (us)
T4.3 Policy and Research Summits (Nesta)
T4.4 Town hall forums (Nesta)
T4.5 Innovators Summits (Resonance)
T4.6 National contact point & FIF coordination (Nesta)

T4.4 Town hall forums [M5-M34]
Partner(s): Nesta (Task leader), Edgeryders, City of Amsterdam, Resonance Design
Motivation for the task: To more actively involve the broader general public in shaping the Next Generation Internet, we will host a number of town hall events across Europe. These town halls will empower citizens to share their concerns about specific aspects of the internet relevant to their local contexts through a citizen-jury like model, and give their opinions about how to collaboratively design the right policies and solutions to address these issues. These town halls will be ambitious events, working in partnership with local governments and like-minded civil society organisations, ensuring impacts and outcomes might actually have an impact on the local level.
Work plan: Throughout the project, at least 4 of these town halls will be organised at different locations across Europe, involving between 100-250 participants each time. The content used to inform and frame the discussions will come from the topic and debate mapping in WP1 and W2 and build on the futures workshops in WP3. Topics of town halls will be specific, and relevant to the local issues a specific locale faces. These events will be organised in partnerships with local policymakers (city hall) and like-minded civil society organisations.
Partners roles: This task will be led by Nesta, with support from the City of Amsterdam, Edgeryders and Resonance Design.
Relationship with other tasks: Information and insights from WP1 and 2 will feed into this task. Insights from the town halls will directly flow into the articulation of the NGI Vision and set of recommendations in WP6.

T4.5 Innovators Summits [M5-M31]
Partner(s): Resonance Design (Task leader), Aarhus University, Nesta, Edgeryders
Motivation for the task: We will host three innovators summits during the project, bringing together the maker, startup and hacker communities that are now dispersed in their own channels. Based on input from WP 1-4 we will refine topics and output. A key focus is also on promoting the creation of small, multidisciplinary teams during these summits, particularly for the benefit of the RIA Cascaded funds.
Work plan: We work closely with local actors in the ecosystems to build bridges between the various maker communities through the Meetups and Salons, we have an annual capstone event bringing this community together (between 100-150 participants). Working in close collaboration with one or two of the leading technology bloggers The Verge, CNET, or TechCrunch, we ensure content is disseminated widely and reaches new audiences.
Partners roles: All partners are involved in building the conceptual framework for each Summit. Resonance Design and Nesta will moderate and streamline the output to the various stakeholders.
Relationship with other tasks: Meetups, Salons and the input from WP 1 -4 will guide the content and scope.

T4.6 National contact point & FIF coordination [M3-M33]
Partner(s): Nesta (Task Leader), Resonance Design, Edgeryders
Motivation for the task: One particularly powerful mechanism for dissemination and building more sustained engagement with the Next Generation Internet community is the national contact point and FIF system. We think more can be done to involve this community into the core activities of the NGI by building bridges between them and our wider NGI stakeholder communities.
Work plan: National contact points are responsible for disseminating the NGI in their respective member state and organising workshops for local stakeholders, and function as a source of information and support for those seeking to engage with the initiative. We believe that weaving these activities into core NGI Forward outputs can help strengthen the synergies between both communities (now quite fragmented), and bolster the wider NGI community. In this task, we
will provide a space for information and learnings for our NCP community, maintain a frequent line of communication and channel our support to on the ground activities.
Partners roles: This task will be led by Nesta, with support from Resonance Design and Edgeryders.
Relationship with other tasks: Where possible, we will directly involve the FIF and national contact point networks into our events and stakeholder activities, such as the salons (T4.1), the Impact Summit (T4.2) and the consultation.

See see pp26 – 28 of the DOA if you’d like to read on each task in detail.

WP5: COMMUNICATIONS

And of course clearly the work package on comms is directly relevant to your engagement work. Lead by Nesta it features three tasks that are relevant to your engagement strategy, including the Community journalism programme which we need to discuss further with @johncoate and @noemi in terms of leadership and roll out. We have 12 PMs for this work package and as you and I talked about, in addition to the two aforementioned tasks, there is budget for us to engage a comms specialist that will work with you and I.

Comms specialist:

T5.1 Media outreach and dissemination [M2-M36]
Partner(s): Nesta (Task leader), Edgeryders, Resonance Design.
Motivation for the task: Absolutely key to generating the kind of impact we need to make the Next Generation Internet a household name across Europe is to disseminate our wide range of project activities through existing mass media and social media channels, as well as tap into newly emerging media formats such as the growing vloggers community. To do this most effectively, we have merged these efforts into one task involving all partners to ensure we develop a shared voice, visual identity and coherence across different project activities.
Work plan: At the start of the project, we will collaborative draft a shared communications strategy document that will set out key modes we plan to engage with key media channels. As the intellectual core of the NGI, we will generate a lot of interesting outputs, which we commit to turning into more engaging and public facing outputs as well (responsive blogs, data visualisations, short videos) to reach a wider audience. This task also involves establishing media partnerships and engaging social media outreach. We will work in close collaboration with the press office to ensure consistency across NGI projects.
Partners role: All partners will contribute to this task.
Relationship with other tasks: This task will help with fuelling conversation on the consultation platform and during salons.

Currently written as lead by @johncoate:

T5.2 Community journalism programme [M5-M24]
Partner(s): Edgeryders (Task leader), Nesta
Motivation for the task: To help stimulate conversation, and give voice to our grassroots communities, we encourage passionate and vocal members of the online community (in liaison with external journalists and thinkers) to create content that seeds topical debate on the platform.
Work plan: We deploy a community journalism program. This consists in engaging respected and accessible voices with a good social media presence and commissioning them high-quality posts on their perspectives around a human-centric next generation internet. This creates “seed” content that can be re-shared on social media in T2.2 to aggregate debate, attract new users and new contributions. We aim to commission 60 such pieces over eighteen months of the project.
Partners role: This task will be led by Edgeryders, with support from Nesta, and inviting recommendations and
contributions from other partners.
Relationship with other tasks: This task will help with fuelling conversation on the consultation platform and stakeholder events such as the salons.

One of the tasks I’ll be responsible for:

T5.4 NGI Visions Book [M6-M20]
Partner(s): Nesta (Task leader), Edgeryders
Motivation for the task: To help really solidify the NGI’s position as a hub for interesting thinking on the internet and and motivate our community, we need ambitious and provocative visions for what the internet could be. This is why we will create a second edition of the NGI Visions Book, building on the successful model currently underway in EU Engineroom. This book will be released as both a website and physical print book, bringing together essays and visions for the future internet by leading internet thinkers, emerging voices, and creative outputs such as photo essays, data visualisations and sci-fi stories reflecting on the topic of building a human-centric internet.
Work plan: We commission between ten and fifteen written contributions from high-profile thinkers in the internet space, as well as ten more creative outputs by artists (illustrations, photography, interactive data visualisation, videos on relevant youtube channels, short stories, comics). These contributions will be turned into a dynamic, well-designed website and a hard-copy book. Though we plan to release the visions book mid-way through the project (M20), we will separately release content on a more trickled-through schedule, ensuring we have a constant stream of interesting content to engage our audience.
Partners role: This task will be led by Nesta, inviting creative inputs from other partners.
Relationship with other tasks: This task is one of the core public facing outputs of the project, and will be disseminated through other stakeholder engagement tasks. Potential contributors will be scouted through the community journalism programme and other channels.

Communications

To continue on comms, as discussed in our meeting, it requires great consideration and sensitivities across both projects. In addition to you and I working closely on communications as they extend beyond your outreach campaigning to meet consortia wide guidelines, POPREBEL has political sensitivities the consortia needs to attend to, and and in the case of NGI Forward, significant collaboration will be required with the project tasked with communications for the whole NGI initiative. From the call:

vi) ‘Outreach Office’: will execute the programme communication strategy, branding and marketing activities, including extensive online and social media presence and events, establishing a positive brand image among young researchers, innovators, policy makers and people at large. Centralised, more efficient and professional, it will lead communications towards the outside world but also coach all actions under this topic in effective communications and marketing.

I have chosen to wait on the comms brief in light of the above and limited background on it until the projects start. This is something we’ll need to bring up for further clarification at the kick off meetings in January, particularly for POPREBEL as you’ll be starting engagement so early on.

Project planning and reporting

As per this post

@anique.yael

With two large projects it is vital that we have light and easy planning and reporting tools.

An Edgeryders Major Milestones calendar has been created as per here. While Teams can of course plan their implementation how they choose, I ask you to keep your key milestones in the calendar and Dynalist so that my team can keep across project delivery.

I have consolidated Dynalist as per the Dynalist Manual, and created sub-category’s for each team leader to document both project wide planning at present. From it:

Task leaders, you are invited to document here your planning for both research projects and associated scaling.
For project specific planning, please feel free to create your own sub-category using the H3 format - for example:
POPREBEL multilingual community management and ethnographic coding with partners below
No matter what, please note major milestones in the Edgeryders major milestones calendar
We are working that your tasks are automatically synced to the calendar.

@matthias and I are also developing a suite of streamlined reporting tools that all Team members will use to log time and budget spent. They will be shared when finished by projects’ kick off.

Once again, this is a little dipping our toes in the water so that we can feel secure and let the excitement of these extraordinary projects drive us. I am open to your reflections.

So in short:

• Please document key milestones in the Edgeryders Events calendar and Dynalist
• Please join the team stand ups on every second Monday at 17:00 CET from 7 January 2019 (see your calendar) which will be short calls between the teams to keep us cohesive, informed and in joy.
• Please document on the platform and work with the project management team around reporting

Recruitment and budget

Further to the call in October with the other team leaders on recruitment I invite you to review its documentation here.

As I understand it you’ll be recruiting someone to work with you on administration and coordination, and the project coordinator from my team will work closely with them to try to keep the silly stuff out of the picture. In addition, the engagement task has budget for 3000 EUR per onboarding workshop to engage a partner or practitioner in each target community. As discussed above and elsewhere, we’ll convene in a collective call on how to work with the impact summits and community journalism programme.

In terms of allocated budget to your tasks, while we discussed the scope in our meeting please keep in mind that these continue to be moving. I’m hoping to prepare the Magic Budget spreadsheets for both projects this week and will be running all team leaders by them accordingly.
I suspect more questions will arise and of course feel free to share them here or we can have another meeting to discuss. In our last we talked about you drafting a plan up based on this for our review, so let me know if there’s anything else I can do to support that.

This is an epic engagement scope for sure. I have no doubt that you will rock rolling it out and there will be magic in the process. Thanks for taking it on @nadia!

[anique.yael]

One key factor to add that while is implicit is important to explicate:

Multilingualism

Both POPREBEL and NGI Forward are engaging communities across Europe towards multilingual fora on edgeryders.eu. Your engagement strategy will need to align with these very closely.

POPREBEL languages = English, Polish, Czech, Serbian-Croation-Bosnian-Montenegran

NGI Forward languages = English, German, Italian, French and Polish

In addition to what I’ve shared above, the DOAs detail further how the research, partner activities and case studies call for these languages. Let me know if not clear.