Co-Deciding Europe: Civic Tech for Good Governance and Active Citizenship
CODE Europe is a project about empowering citizens to co-create policies with decision makers through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a participatory democracy mechanism that takes advantage of the availability of technological solutions to solicit and analyse “the wisdom of the crowd”. We want to empower citizens by giving them the opportunity to learn from each other, collaborate and participate in the decision-making.
The CODE Europe project is piloting a crowdsourcing activity in five European countries on the subject of air quality. We have chosen this specific topic because of its transnational nature and the problems associated with it, as it has been estimated to be responsible for more than 400.000 premature deaths each year.
The consortium will develop a universally applicable methodology to allow objective comparison of the results of e-participation projects across time and geographical space and use it for evaluating the crowdsourcing pilots.
The consortium will also test a ‘social listening’ method through a Digital Dashboard to include citizens’ opinions on ‘air quality’ beyond the actively engaged citizens participating in the crowdsourcing pilot. The project will deliver guidelines for ethical ‘social listening’ to benefit from the availability of big data while protecting individual privacy and safeguarding citizens against inappropriate access and use of data.
This project is supported by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation.
The task of the project are the followings:
- Develop a universally applicable methodology for assessment of e-participation experiences to be tested through the crowdsourcing pilots in order to ensure a learning curve.
- Develop guidelines for ethical ‘social listening’ which benefits from the availability of big data while protecting individual privacy and safeguarding citizens against inappropriate access to and use of data.
- Contribute to strengthening of democratic culture and civic awareness in the targeted beneficiary countries and EU-wide by soliciting the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ on the subject of ‘air quality’ and gaining insights through social listening which will inform policy-making.
- Ensure exchange of lessons learnt and know-how throughout the project partnership and beyond through a series of events, brainstorms and online courses.
This project is being implemented by a consortium led by CSS – Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary.
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