SENSE4US

Dear readers,

Sense4us project had a busy and rewarding spring. Project partners worked towards contacting, meeting with and communicating the project to all interested target groups at local, national and European level. An online survey about policy-making process, policy outcomes/consequences, policy-related information and the tools the project will be creating for policy-makers was prepared and circulated to MPs, MEPs, ministers, policy-makers, advisors and EU Commissioners. In addition to the survey, a series of interviews were conducted with policy-makers in order to present the project and explain how the solution that will be created by the project will assist them in their work.

Project partners also attended a series of events related to Sense4us and participated in interesting discussions and workshops. In these events, we had the opportunity to present the project, connect with a community interested in our work and distribute our promotional material.

Moreover, Sense4us also made liaisons with several other EU projects and initiatives that focus on the same thematic area. These liaisons give us the opportunity to build strong and useful relationships and create a circle of mutual understanding that helps our project. Up till now, several diverse actions and collaborations have been mutually agreed upon with the following projects: Consensus, Symphony, ePolicy and Unite Europe. A series of mutual workshops and presentations have been scheduled for the upcoming months.

If you have any comments or suggestions, we will be more than glad to receive them, so please feel free to contact us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Enjoy the reading!

The Sense4us Dissemination and Communication Team

Sense4us target groups’ outreach gets attention and engages policy-makers

In only a few months, Sense4us project managed to approach and engage a significant number of people important for the success of the project: MPs, MEPs, policy-makers, policy advisors, civil servants and scientific staff.

Project partners have circulated an online survey about the policy-making process with interesting questions for the people who shape policy. Moreover, they have conducted a series of interviews with members from the UK Parliament, the European Parliament & Commission and the German Bundestag and City states. Overall, more than 150 people were interviewed, participated in focus groups and responded to the online survey in local, national and European level.

We got some extremely useful information from all people who responded to our online survey that we used to develop the interviews and focus group questions. This is just the start of an ongoing engagement strategy to develop requirements in an iterative way with end users and to evaluate the tools that are being created.

Sense4us presentation at the ePolicy Workshop

The Sense4us consortium was invited by the consortium of the ePolicy project (www.epolicy-project.eu) to present the project and its developments at the ePolicy workshop that took place in May 19 2014 in Cork, Ireland.

The consortium, led by University of Southampton’s IT Innovation Center, gave a detailed presentation on the motivation and background of the project, and briefed the workshop attendees on the developments of the work of each Work Package, the challenges and the steps in the upcoming months.

Sense4us signs Memorandum of Understanding with Consensus project

Sense4us has signed a MoU with another EU-funded project in the Policy Modeling domain, the Consensus project (www.consensus-project.eu).

The MoU sets out two key collaborative objectives for both projects:

• Sharing expertise and information relating to policy modeling and the use of tools that enhance the work of policy-makers and
• Developing reciprocal promotional and dissemination activities.

The two projects have already designed and organized collaborative actions and workshops for the upcoming months.

The MoU was signed by the Dissemination Leaders of both projects.

Project collaboration with Symphony project and presentation at the Symphony Focus Group

Our project is in close collaboration with another EU co-funded project: Symphony (www.projectsymphony.eu). Like Sense4us, Symphony project will also develop innovative tools for policy makers. On 20th of June, Sense4us participated at the focus group organized by Symphony in Athens-Greece, where experts from various fields as well as citizens were brought together to discuss about the technologies that are going to be created for the policy makers, the vision of this and other related projects, the methodologies and the approach, as well as the challenges and expected outcomes of these initiatives.

Sense4us presented the project, its mission and objectives, distributed promotional material and participated in the extremely interesting discussion that followed. Both Sense4us and Symphony projects have agreed on creating further synergies in the future, that will bring more visibility and will validate the results of both projects.

MADwDATA national programme kicks off in Birmingham

Making a Difference with Data programme set to explore how public and private sector can exploit the data promise for the benefit of city neighbourhoods and communities.

The Making a Difference with Data programme launch event, sponsored by CAPITA and scheduled for 26 June in Birmingham has announced the chair and speaker line-up. MADwDATA is designed to engage and connect local leaders across health, social care, education, transport, utilities, business, innovation, social enterprise, and the third sector to explore how data can be harnessed for the benefit of city neighborhoods and communities.

Open Data Challenge Series

The Open Data Institute and the Centre for Challenge Prizes at Nesta are running a series of seven challenge prizes to invite businesses, startups and individuals to develop innovative solutions to social issues using open data.

They have run challenges in Crime and Justice, Education and Energy + Environment so far and they have four more themes to go.

Energy Policy Modeling in the 21st Century (Understanding Complex Systems)

The roles and applications of various modeling approaches, aimed at improving the usefulness of energy policy models in public decision making, are covered by this book. The development, validation, and applications of system dynamics and agent-based models in service of energy policy design and assessment in the 21st century is a key focus.

More on this book

Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space

Linked Data provides a publishing paradigm in which not only documents, but also data, can be a first class citizen of the Web, thereby enabling the extension of the Web with a global data space based on open standards - the Web of Data.

More on this book

Policy measures in the deleveraging process: A macroprudential evaluation (in Journal of Policy Modelling)

This paper evaluates post-crisis effects of deleveraging policy in Slovenia. Reductions in banks’ credits to nonfinancial sectors were driven by increased collateralization, credit rationing, and a neglect of cash flow performance of banking clients.

The full paper in Journal of Policy Modelling