Open4Citizens improves the meaningful use of Open Data supporting the engagement of urban communities.
The latest developments in Open Data and Open Government allow the collection and publication of huge datasets that can provide insightful information on many aspects of urban life (health care, social and environmental services). However, the full potential of this phenomenon is still largely untapped: even though such databases are constantly incorporating new data, the resulting information is only used by a small number of organizations mostly private that know how to use this data for commercial purposes. While the European Union promotes the vision that all Public Sector Information should become available to the general public, in just few cases Open Data is actually used to support better public policies or decision-making.
The EU funded O4C project aims to integrate citizens more tightly both at the input and output side of the Open Data phenomenon. On the input side, the data collected from institutional sources (such as traffic-related, environmental, statistics) are complemented by user generated data (such as anonymous logs to portals and personal data users are willing to make publicly available on social networks). On the output side, the project focuses on the creation of “playgrounds”, where citizens and other local actors are empowered to actually convene and cooperate to the development of new web and mobile applications that enhance their very own experience of already existing public services. These playgrounds include service jams, hackathons, co-design workshops, and other physical or virtual events, open to citizens, interest groups, but also representatives of the public sector, students, hackers and startuppers.
O4C is carried out in five pilot locations – in Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands – with the purpose of creating unique communities of practice (OpenDataLabs) , whereby citizens and other stakeholders can co-create innovative applications based on Open Data. The project will investigate and document the ways Open Data allow to cocreate new public services that improve the quality of their daily lives.
The consortium: Aalborg University Copenhagen - coordinator (Denmark), I2CAT (Spain), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Telecom (Italy), Experio (Sweden), Antropologerne (Denmark), TU Delft (The Nederlands), Dataprocess (Denmark).
H2020 Contract Number: ICT687818
Subprogramme Area: Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation
To know more about the project: http://www.open4citizens.eu