POP-MACHINA aims to demonstrate the power and potential of the maker movement and collaborative production for the EU circular economy. We draw from a number of cut-edge technologies (factory-of-the-future, blockchain) and disciplines (urban planning, architecture) to provide the support necessary to overcome scaling issues; a typical drawback of collaborative production; to find the areas more in need of our intervention and to reconfigure unused spaces. We put forth an elaborate community engagement program to network, incentivize and stimulate through maker faires and events existing and new maker communities in all our municipalities. We build upon the current informal curriculum for maker skills development by nurturing the social side and we put educators and makers together to exchange ideas on the training modalities. A particular focus on the skill development of women and vulnerable groups will aim to empower these (underrepresented) segments to partake actively in collaborative production. In every pilot area we will demonstrate business oriented collaborative production of feasible and sustainable concepts from secondary raw material or other sustainable inputs, based on the needs and preferences of the local stakeholders. A thorough impact assessment framework with increased scope (e.g. social) will be co-designed with stakeholders after short basic assessment trainings and will be used in the assessment of our pilot work. Based on the findings we will kick-start a series of policy events to discuss openly – without pushing our results – the tax and legal barriers that hamper collaborative production.

IoT systems today tend to be built around the concept of IoT/cloud convergence, integrating heterogeneous data streams within cloud infrastructures, and thus benefiting from the scalability, performance and capacity of the cloud. This approach is very efficient for some IoT applications such as big data processing problems. However, these architectures promote a centralized data collection and processing approach, which introduces several limitations in terms of supported applications and business models that they enable. The main goal of M-Sec project is to empower IoT stakeholders to develop, deploy and operate novel IoT applications based on a scalable highly decentralized paradigm, which facilitates incentivized peer-to-peer interactions between objects and people. The project will explore semantically interoperable interactions between people/objects according to a given social context, beyond their simple peer-to-peer information exchange and internetworking. Overall, the M-Sec paradigm will enable the introduction and implementation of specific classes of applications and services that are not efficiently supported by state-of-the-art architectures. The M-Sec project will deliver a set of concrete and added value main results: 1. M-Sec distributed, self-organized, robust and trusted IoT infrastructure that empowers IoT stakeholders to develop, deploy and operate novel multipurpose IoT applications for smart cities on top of smart objects. 2. An open IoT market of applications, data and services that provides the framework upon which objects and people can exchange value and defines the motivation incentives for humans and smart objects to interact. 3. A sustainable ecosystem of stakeholders, roles, tools and infrastructures upon which new entrants and other players can build and experiment with the future application services. 4. A parameterized model on how to replicate the M-Sec approach further and guarantee its return of investment and benefits.

OrganiCity offers a new paradigm to European digital city making. Built on and extending the FIRE legacy, this project seeks to build a strong foundation for future sustainable cities through co-creation by a wide range of stakeholders. Globally, Europe is a champion of sustainable, inclusive and open societies. The digital age enables us to push this position further and to rethink the way we create cities and facilitate living by integrating many complex systems. OrganiCity combines top-down planning and operations with flexible bottom-up initiatives where citizen involvement is key. So far, this has been difficult to achieve. Previous attempts to scale informal one-off projects or broaden single community projects have failed. By focusing on the city as a sociotechnical whole, OrganiCity brings software, hardware and associated human processes flexibly together into a new living city that is replicable, scalable, as well as socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. Three clusters – Aarhus (DK), London (UK) and Santander (ES) – recognised for their digital urban initiatives, bring their various stakeholders together into a coherent effort to develop an integrated Experimentation-as-a-Service facility respecting ethical and privacy sensitivities and potentially improving the lives of millions of people. The OrganiCity consortium will create a novel set of tools for civic co-creation, well beyond the state of the art in trans-disciplinary participatory urban interaction design. The tools will be validated in each cluster and integrated across the three cities. In addition to citizen-centric join of testbeds, partner technologies and enhancements, two open calls with a budget of €1.8M will permit 25-35 experiments to use the new facility and co-creation tools. The aim is to grow sustainable digital solutions for future cities that are adjusted to the culture and capacities of each city unlocking amended services and novel markets.

The impacts of climate change on people, planet and prosperity are intensifying. Many regions and communities are struggling to avoid losses and need to step up the effort to increase their climate resilience. Ongoing natural capital degradation leads to growing cost, increased vulnerability, and decreased stability of key systems. Therefore, the European Mission on Climate Adaptation acknowledges the need to adopt a systemic approach by working across sectors and disciplines, experimenting, and involving local communities. NBRACER steps up to this challenge with an innovative and practical approach to accelerate the transformation towards climate resilient regions that are safe, green, clean, healthy, and just. Adaptation will be based on the smart packaging of nature-based solutions (NBS), rooted in the resources supplied by biogeographic landscapes, and embedded in a transformative action approach that mobilizes and enables regions and communities to accelerate forward. NBRACER works with Demonstrating and Replicating regions in the European Atlantic biogeographical area to vision and co-design place based sustainable NBS that are at one with the regional landscapes, upscaling these into coherent regional packages and building time and place specific adaptation pathways integrating local solutions and regional scales. This process is supported by a regional scale effort to build adaptation journeys with community support, with input from teams testing and validating place based NBS solution portfolios situated in landscapes. Innovative technical and adaptation transformation support packages provide quantitative mapping methods and a transformative action approach and capacity building, and networking enable scaling out and building connections. Led by Deltares, advanced in climate adaptation science, the consortium builds synergy from the strength of practitioners, ecosystem engineers, innovators of transformative adaptation, finance, and capacity building experts.

PoSeID-on is aimed at developing a novel Privacy Enhancing Dashboard for personal data protection supporting the pillars of the new EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with regards to digital security, that will be implemented within a single, integrated tool, adopting blockchain and smart contracts technology. It will provide targeted benefits for final end users by enabling data protection by design and by default. In particular, the project will deliver an easily accessible and simple privacy enhancing dashboard useful for monitoring, keeping track record, and controlling all aspects related to data subjects personal data, privacy settings, eventually deciding to authorize/un-authorize personal data transfers. Thus, the primary aim of PoSeID-on is empowering data subjects in having a concise, transparent, intelligible and ease access, as well as tracking, control and management of their personal data processed by public and private organizations, acting as data controllers and/or data providers. They will be able to make conscious decisions on who can process their own data based on data controller trustworthiness, enabling or revoking permissions, asking for definitely remove their personal data or restricting the data to be shared following the data minimisation principle. A risk management framework will be integrated into the privacy enhancing dashboard. As secondary aim, PoSeID-on will support the compliance of technological services and products with the GDPR regarding personal data, by integrating advanced ICT-based tools within a replicable and scalable frame, which can be implemented within a broad spectrum of products and services. Moreover, personal data exchanges across data subjects and different organisations (public & private) or among organizations in case of involved third parties will take place in a secure and privacy-compliant way, generating benefits thanks to the adoption of more streamlined procedures.