SENSE4US

Our project partner, GESIS, attended the 21st expert forum hosted by the Federation of German Internet Portals under the topic “Status quo municipal internet portals?”

Details

Category: Blog

Created on Thursday, 27 August 2015 15:26

Many local authorities are hosting websites for providing information for citizens and the local economy. Some websites include tools to engage relevant actors in the decision-making process. However, given the digital change, new requirements (like mobile usage) come up. Hence the key question is: if “traditional” websites of local authorities are obsolete, how to overcome the issue of new requirements? The 21st expert panel “Quo vadis local websites” addressed these issues by comparing different local authority cases of current website releases. The event took place in Berlin and was organized by the Federation of German Internet Portals. Its co-organizers were the German association for cities and local communities and the German association for local districts. The event’s results will be used to learn from local authorities’ workflows and identify potential scenarios within the mentioned field of information research and Open Data. The main outcome of this event was that budgets are too limited and will not increase soon, so local authorities need to find effective strategies for providing state of the art internet portals for citizens and local companies. Concerning the level of decision-making or publishing Open Data, approaches like SENSE4US may add benefit to these strategies.

GESIS started the dialogue with one of the eleven State Ministries in North Rhine-Westphalia

Details

Category: Blog

Created on Thursday, 23 July 2015 15:24

The Ministry which is responsible for the policy issues regarding families, children, youth, culture and sports, supports the digital strategy “Open.NRW”, which was initiated by the Government in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). The digital hub for this strategy located at https://open.nrw and is the data and information portal which addresses (a) open data, (b) dialogue, and (c) collaboration for all actors (ministries, local authorities, citizens, etc.) in NRW. This means the State together with the Ministries, cities and local authorities needs to "make sense" of the data in the portal. The aforementioned Ministry has already started the process of publishing Open Data, but this publishing is one important step. External actors can find scenarios where the data is beneficial, and one example of a useful application is a mobile app where families can find the nearest day-care facility for their children in Düsseldorf using geo-location data. In May, GESIS began a dialogue with this State Ministry looking at potential scenarios how SENSE4US can provide benefit in the areas of information retrieval and decision-making.

eGovLab introduces SENSE4US project to Mr. Max Andersson, MEP in Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance

Details

Category: Blog

Created on Monday, 24 August 2015 15:25

Mr. Max Andersson, MEP in Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, from Miljöpartiet, visited eGovlab in Stockholm University on May 29th, 2015. He was accompanied with his political advisor and met by our partner, Dr. Somya Joshi from eGovlab. An enthusiastic proponent of open source, transparency and advanced decision support within the EP, Mr. Andersson was curious about the tools being developed within the SENSE4US Project. He was given a brief introduction on the initiative, as well as a hands-on introduction to the prototype being developed. The response of Mr. Andersson and his support team was a very positive one and they are keen to be in touch with us during the second leg of our end user engagement as well as prototype development.

About Mr. Andersson’s work in the EP
Follow him on Twitter

UI Workshop: SENSE4US Design team met in Stockholm on June 17th, 2015

Details

Category: Blog

Created on Monday, 20 July 2015 15:23

The SENSE4US toolkit’s User Interface (UI) has to communicate complex concepts to users, who are not experts in the research fields of the project. What emerges from this is a genuine need to present SENSE4US results to end users in an intuitive manner. Towards this end, Stockholm University hosted a workshop on 17 June 2015, bringing together developers and users of the SENSE4US project with creative and media specialists from Hyper Island with the aim of generating new ideas for the Sense4us toolkit’s front end and making it more usable. A specific objective of the workshop was to get input from specialists in the fields of gaming and human-computer interaction, who had no previous knowledge of the project, so as to bring a fresh perspective and new ideas to the project’s developers. This intention was fulfilled in that the workshop generated some very useful ideas that the project partners had not previously imagined, and these ideas are likely to be developed and incorporated into the next version of the Sense4us toolkit.