Dear Reader,

The time has come for the SENSE4US project to bid goodbye, at least for now.  This project, aiming to enable policy making, kicked off in October of 2013 and completes its cycle in December of 2016 with the current Newsletter Issue.

The articles that follow will take you through the latest SENSE4US news while also update you on relevant publications and events.

Keep in mind that we always like to hear from you, so if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at: [email protected]

With this, we’d like to thank you for keeping up with our project’s developments and being part of our community during the past 39 months. Hope to see you again soon!!!

Enjoy the reading!

The SENSE4US Dissemination and Communication Team

Policy Making in a Complex World - Can technology restore trust in European decision-making?

The SENSE4US consortium organized a successful Final Conference on the 8th of December in Brussels, Belgium.

During this one day event parliamentarians, policy makers, academics and civil society members discussed how digital tools and technologies can enable policy makers access and summarise a wide array of relevant data, taking into account the views of citizens on policy issues and better acknowledging the implications of proposed policies.

During the Conference the project partners showcased to the general public the SENSE4US toolbox combined with a demo that gave better understanding of each tool’s use and possibilities:

SENSE4US project presented in 50th ICA conference

eGovlab, SENSE4US project partner, participated in the 50^th ICA conference where Mr. Vasilis Koulolias (eGovlab) led the discussion and presented the possibilities of how technological tools like SENSE4US can lead to new era of “anticipatory governance”.

During this session participants addressed the following questions:

• Are co-creation & participatory design - the key to trust & transparency for policy making?
• What are the big, open & linked data challenges in policy making?

The feedback of the break-out group composed of CIOs from over 20 countries and organizations was presented during the report back of the conference session.

SENSE4US project partner, Hansard society, organized the event: “Future Parliament: Hacking the legislative process/capacity, scrutiny, engagement”, which was held on 14th November 2016 in London, UK.

During the event participants had the opportunity to examine problems in the legislative process – e.g. time, speed, resources, access to expert knowledge, scrutiny capacity – and looked at how new technological developments might provide the answer to these.

With the UK Parliament expected to move to a temporary new location in a few years to facilitate a major refurbishment programme, a second panel explored how a temporary new building could be turned into a parliamentary laboratory to trial and test new digital technology in order to support the legislative and scrutiny process.

The opening event of the UK Parliament’s ‘Parliament Week’ (a programme of events and activities to connect people across the UK with Parliament and democracy), brought together over 80 experts from Parliament, the technology sectors and civil society, including MPs, parliamentary clerks from Westminster, the Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales and Northern Ireland Assembly, journalists (including BBC Parliament), and civil society/political reform campaign groups.

Sense4us was introduced at the start of the event and the project tools were showcased by project partners who presented Live demonstrations. Participants had the opportunity to take a closer look at the possibilities SENSE4US has to offer through video screenings during the breaks.

The event assisted with end user engagement. As a result, several organisations expressed interest in the tool’s future.

House of Lords – Can technology support the legislative process?

The Hansard Society’s director, Dr. Ruth Fox provided evidence at the first session of the Committee’s new inquiry into the legislative process.

One of the key questions the committee is exploring is what role technology might play in supporting the legislative process. Ruth Fox referenced the SENSE4US tools in response to this question.

The meeting was recorded and broadcast live on the UK Parliament TV channel and you can view it here. (The relevant question starts at about 11:21 in the video)

SENSE4US collaboration and cross dissemination with other EU project

SENSE4US and EUMSSI established a new collaboration and cross dissemination aiming at greater visibility and outreach.

The EUMSSI project develops technologies for identifying and aggregating data presented as unstructured information in sources of very different nature (video, audio, text and social context), including both online (e.g. YouTube) and traditional media (e.g. audiovisual repositories), and for dealing with information of very different degrees of granularity.

ITPRO - Can technology improve our democracy?

The internet makes it easy to be an armchair activist, retweeting a campaigner's call to action, mass-emailing demands to an MP, or tagging your representative in a Facebook post. (…) The widely held belief that social media and digital tools let us have a real discussion is false. "Technology can help us improve conversation, but if the fundamental interaction at the start of it is misleading or confused, then it doesn't matter how great your hashtag is, how great your Facebook [post] is, or how original your Instagrams, people are going to at some point... feel misled and frustrated, and that there's no point in engaging in the first place.”

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Open eGovernment practices in all EU Member States make public services more collaborative, efficient and inclusive

In a digital single market, public services should be digital, open and cross-border by design. As part of the eGovernment Action Plan, public administrations and public institutions should be providing borderless user-friendly and end-to-end digital public services to all citizens and businesses by 2020. Two Commission studies highlight how collaborative and digitally-based Open eGovernment Services (OGS) can enhance transparency and responsiveness in citizens' dealings with administration, build trust across sectors and provide better public services.

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World Resources Institute - The Future of Open Government

The ultimate potential of open government lies in its ability to improve human wellbeing. Greater public participation in decision making, increased transparency in how public resources are used, and more public scrutiny over decision makers are all vital to deepening democracy in rich and poor countries alike.

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