The raise of Fab Labs and maker spaces are creating new opportunities for citizen-driven innovation in a myriad domains ranging from open hardware to digital fabrication, community informatics, and participatory sensing. In the past five years, the broad availability of open hardware tools, the creation of online data sharing platforms, and access to maker spaces have fostered the design of low cost and open source sensors that independent communities of citizens can appropriate to engage in environmental action. By collectively measuring and making sense of changes in environmental phenomena citizens can become aware of how their lifestyle affects the ecosystem and be inspired to adopt more sustainable behaviours at the individual and community levels. Making Sense will show how open source software, open source hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be effectively used by local communities to appropriate their own technological sensing tools, make sense of their environments and address pressing environmental problems in air, water, soil and sound pollution. To achieve this, the project will develop a Making Sense Toolkit based on the Smart Citizen platform for bottom up citizen science, developed at Fab Lab Barcelona. The toolkit will be tested in pilots in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Prishtina, aimed at deepening our understanding on the processes enabling collective awareness. Based on the pilots, we will develop a conceptual and methodological framework for participatory environmental maker practices. It will show how to provide citizens and communities with appropriate tools to enhance their everyday environmental awareness, to enable active intervention in their surroundings, and to change their individual and collective practices. And finally we will develop will develop a scientifically informed framework for citizen co-inquiry and action towards hands-on transformation of their surroundings.

Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly centralised, slowing innovation and challenging its potential to revolutionise society and the economy in a pluralistic manner. DECODE will develop practical alternatives through the creation, evaluation and demonstration of a distributed and open architecture for managing online identity, personal and other data, and collective governance in a citizen-friendly and privacy-aware fashion. Strong digital rights that makes it possible for data subjects to determine access rights to their information through flexible entitlements and open standard-based agreements regarding data governance (on the model of Creative Commons licenses) will be woven into the technological architecture. DECODE will increase digital sovereignty of European citizens by enabling them to produce, access and control their data and exchange contextualised information in real-time, and in a confidential, and scalable manner. DECODE will develop a modular privacy-aware IoT hub with a free and open source operating system backed by a state of the art blockchain infrastructure supporting smart-contracts and privacy protections. The architecture will be demonstrated through four pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, in the field of digital democracy, citizen sensing, and collaborative economy. The pilots will be run with the active involvement of social entrepreneurs, hackers, and makers. Innovators will be able to build solutions on top of the platform through hackathons and open challenges, while ensuring their security, resilience and privacy preserving qualities. This aims to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem that will attract a critical mass able to shift the current centralised data-driven economy towards a decentralised, sustainable and commons-based economy. DECODE puts agency and data control in the hands of citizens, to improve citizens’ well-being and society for the collective benefit of all.

PULSE-ART will produce compelling evidence illustrating the positive impact of arts in education for the enhancement of cultural expression and awareness (CAE). At the heart of this initiative lies the concept of integrating art, culture, and heritage institutions, including museums, galleries, cultural centres and overall CCIs, into the educational framework. This integration aims to effectively address the deficiencies of the educational system, hindering the improvement of CAE through the arts. Reference materials will be created and integrated into the Arts in Education for Cultural Awareness Observatory, including a Competency Framework, a Professional Development Programme and a self-reflection tool, which will be validated and tested through 7 case studies in 7 countries using different art techniques with a lifelong learning perspective. Collaborative Hubs between educational institutions, spanning all levels of education, and art and cultural heritage organisations will be created to bridge the identified gaps through innovative and tailored methodologies of arts in education, leveraging the expertise and fostering partnerships. PULSE-ART will guarantee the inclusion of all Children & Young people, with the overarching objective of fostering democracy and civic engagement throughout Europe. Multi-stakeholder engagement at different levels (European, national and local), capacity building, co-creation and mutual learning are key elements of PULSE-ART. The consolidation of local partnerships through the case studies will allow accounting for different educational systems and local contexts, embedding intercultural, inclusivity and gender aspects in the research, while the use of a variety of art techniques in different contexts will enrich the validation of the produced methodologies, products and research outcomes. National action plans and a European policy brief will inform policies to support the inclusion of arts in education to increase CAE.

Made4You facilitates co-design of open healthcare for people with physical limitations. People’s needs regarding their physical limitations are personal, subjective and diversified. To customize health care solutions, a process of personalization is needed, which cannot be provided through the current industrial focus of ‘one size fits all’. Therefore, the project aims to: - Build an ecosystem, linking existing local communities of citizens with disabilities and their families, healthcare professionals and makers and establish collaboration between these separate communities to develop their own open-source and license interventions. - Provide access to open source and digital fabrication tools enabling citizens with disabilities and healthcare professionals, in co-creation with designers and makers (DIY communities and maker spaces) to create customized self-made solutions to improve quality of life or services provided. - Improve the accessibility of open source products; co-production of products that are tailored to people with special needs or disabilities as well as healthcare professionals and bypassing the limitations of the classical industrial production. - Foster the ecosystem through open exchange of knowledge, case stories and manuals. Within the DIY approach, local production and global knowledge sharing is key. - Build guidelines that allow anyone to replicate formats everywhere, considering the socio-technical aspects as well as relevant legal and regulatory frameworks, quality standards, IPR implications, security, safety and privacy issues. The long-term goal is to affiliate a community of designers, users, fablabs and maker spaces who develop similar projects and replicate events and activities in various cities all around Europe or even globally. This process will produce a critical mass of projects that can be used and build upon: a knowledge-sharing platform that aims to achieve mass adoption and global impact.

The EU has to face many challenges in achieving a more balanced regional development and sustainable economic recovery. Many of those challenges have to do with the ageing population trend, urbanization and environment under distress. More liveable and efficient communities is a target to be reached in Europe, where the “silver hair” trends can become a challenging opportunity, from a social, economic and cultural perspective. Despite those challenges are strongly interlinked, solutions provided in urban contexts not often pay due attention to the social process underlying urban trends and to the needs and behaviour of elderly citizens. GRAGE intends to contribute to fill this gap, developing winning ideas to promote an active, harmonious and inclusive citizenship for elderly people living in urban contexts. The consortium gathers ground-breaking expertise from different scientific background (legal, economic, humanities, engineering), from academic and non academic institutions, belonging to several countries (from EU and Ukraine). Using a mix of methodologies, the research and innovation programme of the project will evolve around the idea of citizenship as a collector of interest, healthy environment and suitable urban solutions for an aging society. Main themes will be: green buildings, food and urban agriculture, information and language technology. Researcher will analyze their role in transforming cities in environments that support green and healthy lifestyles for elderly people. GRAGE intents to boost dialogue through Europe, both strengthening the academic and non-academic collaboration and a practical understanding of elderly living across Europe. Such a cooperation can have a series of returns for Europe, ranging from a more effective solution to strategic challenges (sustainable cities and demographic change) to new business opportunities for European firms, offering solutions and products for smart/inclusive/ageing societies at global level.