CoAct proposes a radically new approach to face four “wicked” social global issues by engaging vulnerable citizens acting as in-the field competent co-researchers. The approach represents a new understanding of the underexplored field of Citizen Social Science and will result in the implementation of new or improved science-related policies. CoAct’s ambitious Research and Innovation activities will respond to issues related to Mental Health Care, Youth Employment, Environmental Justice and Gender Equality in Barcelona, Vienna, Berlin, Buenos Aires and in European Eastern countries. CoAct will define and develop a general framework for Citizen Social Science as a participatory research co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern. The methodological framework will be first incubated in a consortium with Research Organizations, NGOs and global networks of Open Science and Open Data activism. Expertises from Computational Social Science, Participatory Action Research, Citizen Science evaluation or Citizen-generated Data will be incorporated to conceive a transdisciplinary Citizen Social Science that place vulnerable citizens at the center of Research and Innovation cycles, as co-designers and co-researchers. Secondly, three mission-oriented Actions and at least three Research Pilots will be led by vulnerable citizen groups with the support of Knowledge Coalitions formed by public bodies, CSOs and social innovators. The common effort will harness novel, simultaneously global and local, socially robust knowledge and scientifically reasoned measures to promote social change. An Open Citizen Science toolkit, Open Source digital platforms, and Capacity Building activities to improve data and science literacy, including a PhD Summer School, will be delivered. To demonstrate the scientific relevance and the social impact of CoAct!, a dynamic co-evaluation process with new tools will be done and shared with the broad Citizen Science community.

"Study programmes following blended-learning or even pure online approaches are becoming increasingly popular in higher education. Two main drivers for this development are increasing international cooperations among universities and with industry partners and the special requirements of students in continuing education programmes. But even regular courses use online platforms to establish a permanent point of exchange beyond the weekly course meetings. Yet in a time, where the use of eLearning platforms, Google Drive and Skype feels commonplace, the abundance of available tools conceals the scarcity of processual knowledge to use them, especially compared to the richness of methods we use to apply in physical teaching and collaboration.The OnCreate partnership is about the exchange, implementation and evaluation of processual and contextual knowledge of online collaborative courses with focus on creation and innovation. By the term “Creative Online Collaboration Processes” we refer to all such activities which aim to solve in a group problems that do not have standard solutions, mediated through web-based tools. Typically, such problems require interdisciplinary, lateral thinking, social empathy and extensive ideation with the aim of mutual inspiration. The processes applied are often nonlinear and rely on multimodal means of synchronous and asynchronous communication, with a special focus on visual tools. The project was organized around the four main objectives:RESEARCH - about the state-of-art of creative online collaboration inside and outside the consortiumCREATE - and implement transnational online coursesEVALUATE - online and blended courses for their affordance and support for creative collaborationGENERALIZE - our insights to make them accessible to the publicThe consortium created twenty courses addressing different creative challenges from design to TV development to innovation management. Most of which are suitable to be re-implemented based on the course blueprints available on the project website. Furthermore, the project created a set of seven evaluation packages to enable teachers to evaluate their courses and online course environments with regard to how much they afford creative collaboration. Along came a number of useful teaching methods to structure synchronous and asynchronous activities online. Finally, we gave general recommendations for running online courses on social media platforms, project management apps and learning management systems.The project has attracted four university partners outside the consortium and three industry partners, who have been collaborating actively at least in one course or research activity. Two multiplier Events at Magdeburg, Germany and Lincoln, UK disseminated the project results to a wider audience of practitioners and academics in the fields of media design and digital journalism.Six partners from among the consortium and associated partners are already committed to run at least one common course annually based on the blueprint of the most successful courses. At the same time, the project sparked the idea of a ""blended student exchange"", which comprises online collaborative courses with the partner university the semester before students actually go abroad. This will be the focus of further Erasmus+ activities within the consortium."

PARTHENOS aims at strengthening the cohesion of research in the broad sector of Linguistic Studies, Humanities, Cultural Heritage, History, Archaeology and related fields through a thematic cluster of European Research Infrastructures, integrating initiatives, e-infrastructures and other world-class infrastructures, and building bridges between different, although tightly, interrelated fields. PARTHENOS will achieve this objective through the definition and support of common standards, the coordination of joint activities, the harmonization of policy definition and implementation, and the development of pooled services and of shared solutions to the same problems. PARTHENOS will address and provide common solutions to the definition and implementation of joint policies and solutions for the humanities and linguistic data lifecycle, taking into account the specific needs of the sector that require dedicated design, including provisions for cross-discipline data use and re-use, the implementation of common AAA (authentication, authorization, access) and data curation policies, including long-term preservation; quality criteria and data approval/certification; IPR management, also addressing sensitive data and privacy issues; foresight studies about innovative methods for the humanities; standardization and interoperability; common tools for data-oriented services such as resource discovery, search services, quality assessment of metadata, annotation of sources; communication activities; and joint training activities. Built around the two ERICs of the sector, DARIAH and CLARIN, and involving all the relevant Integrating Activities projects, PARTHENOS will deliver guidelines, standards, methods, services and tools to be used by its partners and by all the research community. It will exploit commonalities and synergies to optimize the use of resources in related domains.