There are several co-benefits of e-government and e-participation solutions [18][17][4][7][5], including: 

Business/technological innovation:  

• E-government and open data initiatives enable individuals or businesses to develop innovative services or apps. These can enhance access to environment data, promote reuse of environmental data, reduce costs and bring compliance to standards, and improve quality of information [18]. 

• The ability to securely share data (across borders e.g., ACROSS, DE4A, GLASS) and apply AI or machine learning to predict future behaviour and potential problems for a given scenario can help finding creative solutions for better service development and provision, planning and entrepreneurship (O4C, DUET, WeLive, Smarticipate, TwinERGY). 

Social inclusion, enhanced participation, connectivity, and community life, and transparency and accountability: 

• Online and/or mobile based e-government solutions aim to provide inclusive public services and enable wider, inclusive and enhanced participation [17], connectivity, and bring transparency, accountability of public services and spending, and opportunities fostering democratic culture and trust ([7], URBANAGE, inGov, Mobile Age, WeGovNow, mGov4EU, DE4A). 

• The case of Rivas Vaciamadrid, a small city in Spain with 88,150 inhabitants highlights impactful use of digital platform for participatory budgeting. In 2019, the platform attracted approximately 200 proposals. [17].  

• WeGovNow lessons learned indicate over 10,000 users registered across pilot sites and feedback indicate strengthening the voice of the public, reaching out into the local community, achieving a better quality of the public discourse, and achieving multilateral stakeholder interaction.  

• Decide Madrid has been visited over 11 million times, 26, 227 proposals have been made and received over 3 million votes of support. Nearly half a million registered users generated nearly 6000 debates and over 193,000 comments [7]. 

• The open source Consul platform has been implemented by 135 institutions in 35 countries, reaching 90 million citizens and 200 million Euros have been spent on initiatives linked to proposals put forward on Consul. 

Improved access to information and raised awareness/behavioural change:  

• Communication through online and mobile channels can help to share knowledge about potential climate-related issues, provide higher visibility of environmental initiatives, raise awareness among stakeholders for behaviour change (TwinERGY), as well as provide improved access to government data for informed decision making and policy making (O4C, WeLive, AI4PublicPolicy, PolicyCLOUD, DECIDO, URBANAGE, inGov, WeGovNow). 

Increased skill development: 

• E-participation is also an opportunity to develop or enhance digital skills through digital competency initiatives. 

Pre-conditions: 

Technical aspects/infrastructure: E-participation solutions rely on access to Internet/web and mobile-based technologies, ranging from simple websites to immersive tools such as Local Digital Twins. Secure and privacy-aware technical and communication infrastructure are essential to collect data from repositories and participants for further processing and analysis. Advancements in technology, e.g., big data processing, open data platforms integrating diverse data sources, AI processing and ability to scale when number of participants increase, are essential for e-government or e-participation platforms [PolicyCLOUD, AI4PublicPolicy]. Compliance to the relevant standards defined by OGC, ISO and W3C, e.g., Web accessibility guide [WAI-Guide], and other guidelines such as FAIR are essential for wider adoption and replicability of digital solutions.  

Regulatory/Legal framework: E-participatory initiatives should pay attention to data privacy and confidentiality requirements because often e-participation platforms store personal data such as opinions, names, email addresses etc.  

Funding and financing: Access to EU/national/local government funding is crucial to roll out and support maintenance of such solutions and can further R&I in e-government and in particular e-participation through innovative approaches. 

Economic and social context:  

• For e-participation initiatives, it is essential to introduce inclusive approach by considering training and capacity building as well as incentivising participation [7].  

• Recent research highlights the importance of both virtual participation in planning during post-Covid 19 era and recommended use of both traditional and virtual modes of participation in order to enable wider and diverse participation [17].  

• For continued utilisation of e-participation platforms by citizens, motivational aspects deserve attention [WeGovNow]. 

Project governance and implementation modalities:  

• Sustainable use of online participation platforms requires embedding the technical infrastructure into a comprehensive political strategy towards stakeholder participation for co-development of a local policy/service [WeGovNow]. 

• Recommendations for policy makers with respect to GovTech for citizen participation are [7]: (1) stimulate GovTech sector, e.g., set up a dedicated program or agency, specialised investment funds and tax incentives, and build capacity and internal capability to develop digital solutions; and (2) build national participatory GovTech strategy, e.g., build legal and administrative framework; include offline options in tech-based participation initiatives (e.g. to reach marginalised social groups), build inspiration narratives, specific stories and case studies. 

• Sustainable use and outcomes of online participation platforms require designing locally adapted participation processes. These platforms rely on data exchange and knowledge sharing among city (sectoral) departments, agencies, companies and stakeholders (industry/business/research institutes) and can benefit from co-creation and co-designing of the solutions [WeGovNow]. 

Enabling conditions: 

Technical aspects/infrastructure: Open-source solutions enable the implementation of e-participation platforms. Many city governments are successfully using open source Consul platform (e.g., Decide Madrid) and Hamburg’s open source digital participation platform DIPAS etc. Similarly, open data platforms such as CKAN or commercial platform powered by Socrata are available for cities. In addition to support on legal and ethics aspects, measuring and monitoring, education and capacity building, the Living-in.EU MIMs Plus supported by OASC (Open and Agile Smart Cities) provide guidance on technical specifications for integration of data, systems and processes. 

Policy and regulatory/legal framework:  

• Local level policies and strategies such as Hamburg’s Digital Strategy [19] and Bristol’s One City Climate Strategy [20] are examples providing political mandate and support.  

• At EU level, the Declaration on European Digital Rights and Principles, part of the Digital Decade Policy Programme, supports the use of digital technologies for citizen engagement and democratic participation [47]. The Common European Data Spaces, being deployed in various sectors such as mobility and public administration, enable the pooling, sharing and access to interoperable data [45], and the European Digital Identity and the new Digital Wallet facilitate personal identification, allowing citizens to store and manage identity data and official documents in electronic format [46]. 

Funding and financing: Citizen participation initiatives including citizen science can benefit from incentives, such as investment funds or tax incentives [7] [WeGovNow]. Public-private partnerships should be established for long-term sustainability of such solutions [SHOTL, OrganiCity]. Support will be provided via the Digital Europe Programme for the deployment of Local Data Platforms. 

Economic and social context: Training for local quadruple helix stakeholders including citizens, companies, researchers and students helps build digital skills needed to use digital solutions and foster innovation potential in different climate-related fields. 

Project governance and implementation modalities:  

• E-governance solutions benefit from clear project ownership and well-defined linkages between e-participation mechanisms and decision-making processes [Smarticipate].  

• An accessible easy-to-use mode of e-participation that is inclusive of citizens of various ages and socio-economic backgrounds. This is not always the case, as seen from older generations of people living in areas without access to the Internet and without the necessary know-how for operating them. 

• Consultation of citizens in design and development of e-participation tools to ensure inclusion and accessibility [48].  

There are several challenges of e-participation identified in the literature [1][18][17][7][5], including: 

Technical aspects/infrastructure: It is necessary to manage operational risks such as hacking of electronic identity, violation of data privacy, and large scale manipulation of data. Maturity of existing e-participation platforms is relatively high but may need customisation and adaptation strategies for a new city context. E-participation platforms may also face the problem of platform scalability due to increasing number of participatory initiatives and participants. 

Funding and financing: Often maintenance costs or participatory platform expansion costs are not taken into account at the time of initial planning. The costs of implementing e-participation initiatives should be weighed up against their benefits (e.g., via a systematic evaluation of e-participation initiatives). 

Policy and regulatory/legal framework: Regulation governing decision-making processes may hamper the implementation of e-participation initiatives. For example, the Madrid City Council’s legal regulations that govern citizen participation had to be changed to allow for lowering the voting pass threshold of Decide Madrid from 2% to 1% of population [7].  

Project governance and implementation modalities:  

• Data and knowledge sharing from (sectoral) departments, agencies, companies or stakeholders require good governance, and political will and support to apply such solutions.  

• Environmental institutions often undertake their own initiatives in silos that results in duplication of efforts, e.g., developing separate environmental information platforms without exploiting e-government or open data solutions, adding burden to already overwhelmed institutions [18].  

• In some cases, it may be hard to reconcile stakeholders’ expectations and incentives to participate. Therefore, it is important to define the goals of e-participation, manage expectations, and prevent participation fatigue.  

• The collection and analysis of results carries several challenges of reliability, i.e., poorly targeted participants, rigid discussion structures, anonymity, inability to read body language, and lack of informal discussion.  

• Often change in political leadership or financial crisis (e.g., recession) can make it difficult to ensure continuity in use or development of participatory tools [7].  

• Lack of accessibility and ease of use poses a major risk to citizen participation platforms. Lack of publicity about such platforms – putting a platform out there with poor dedication to actually invite people to use it – will not guarantee participation 

• Limited attention to the enhancement of e-participation through non-response from the side of the government or furthering the engagement process can result in a negative association with the platform, distrust of the local government, and discourage participation [48,49].   

Economic and social context: Digital divide between different demographics or regions hinders e-participation, e.g. due to unequal access to internet and computer/mobile and digital skills. There may also be limited trust in government and e-governance mechanisms. 

• Data governance risks: Data collection, integration and sharing need to be constantly monitored for compliance with privacy and confidentiality regulations so to maintain trust of stakeholders and citizens.   

• High operational and maintenance costs: A reliable source of funding and/or business models should be considered to cover costs. This necessitates long-term sustainability of the solutions by forming public-private partnerships to ensure sufficient resources are available to keep solutions operational.  

• Rigidity of a public administration, administrative style and organisational culture: Limited willingness to adopt digital solutions can hinder implementation of e-participation initiatives [4]. 

• Problems of management and coordination: In the case of Decide Madrid, citizens’ support was spread across hundreds of petitions on the same topic, instead of being concentrated on one petition [7]. Also, with increasing number of proposals or petitions it becomes difficult to find them through several web pages.  

• Negative environmental impact: Hosting a participatory platform on an unsustainable technology infrastructure and high data transfer between the platform and participants, especially where simulations or high quality 3D visualisations are used, can result in high digital carbon footprint [25].  

• Underestimating early engagement: Bristol Approach to citizen sensing indicated that citizens agree on defining the problem but disagree on the best solution and hence engagement from the start of the project is required to improve understanding of the complexity of the problem [7]. 

• Inadequate design process: Focus on digital tools alone cannot always deliver a successful public service that meets citizens’ needs. A process of co-creation and co-production tailored to the local context may be needed, helping to build trust between public administration and its citizens. Also, it should not be assumed that people would immediately become passionate about e-participation and policy decisions or administrative processes that impact their lives [WeGovNow]. 

Limited participation and inclusiveness: Motivation factors, incentives, capacity building/training, and facilitating e-participation as well as participation through conventional means are essential for wider participation [5]. 

References 

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[2] Guo Y., "E-Government: Definition, Goals, Benefits and Risks," 2010 International Conference on Management and Service Science, 2010, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/ICMSS.2010.5576557. 

[3] Randma-Liiv, T., 2021, Organizing e-participation: Challenges stemming from the multiplicity of actors, public administration, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12788. 

[4] Hovik, S., Giannoumis, G.A., 2022. Linkages Between Citizen Participation, Digital Technology, and Urban Development . In: Hovik, S., Giannoumis, G.A., Reichborn-Kjennerud, K., Ruano, J.M., McShane, I., Legard, S. (eds) Citizen Participation in the Information Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99940-7_1. 

[5] Le Blanc, D., 2020, E-Participation: a quick overview of recent qualitative trends, DESA Working Paper No. 163, ST/ESA/2020/DWP/163, United Nations. https://www.un.org/esa/desa/papers/2020/wp163_2020.pdf.  

[6] Arnstein, S., 1969, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224. 

[7] Leveraging GovTech for citizen participation - Innovative policymaking for the digital era, Digital Future Society, October 2019, https://digitalfuturesociety.com/app/uploads/2019/10/111019_Leveraging_GovTech_for_citizen_participation_digital-1.pdf. 

[8] Manoharan, A.P., Melitski, J. & Holzer, M. Digital Governance: An Assessment of Performance and Best Practices. Public Organiz Rev (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-021-00584-8. 

[9] Felix Júnior, L.A., Guimarães, L.G.d.A., Segundo, E.M.D., Batista da Costa, W.P.L., Abbas El-Aouar, W. (2020). Open Government and E-Government: Concepts, Gaps, Interfaces, and Trends. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_4098-1. 

[10] Meijer Albert, J., Lips, M., Chen K., (2019), Open Governance: A New Paradigm for Understanding Urban Governance in an Information Age, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 1, DOI=10.3389/frsc.2019.00003 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2019.00003/full. 

[11] Soomro, K., Khan, Z., & Ludlow, D. (2017). Participatory governance in smart cities: The urbanAPI case study. International Journal of Services Technology and Management, 23(5-6), 419-444.  https://doi.org/10.1504/IJSTM.2017.10009859. 

[12] Five ways of meaningful involvement of citizens in climate actions, Climate-KIC, opinion Oct 2020, https://www.climate-kic.org/opinion/five-ways-of-meaningfully-involving-citizens-in-climate-action/. 

[13] Khan, Z., Dambruch, J., Peters-Anders, J., Sackl, A., Strasser, A., Fröhlich, P., Templer, S., Soomro, K., 2017, Developing Knowledge-Based Citizen Participation Platform to Support Smart City Decision Making: The Smarticipate Case Study. Information 2017, 8, 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/info8020047. 

[14] H2020 PolicyCLOUD, Deliverable D2.2 Conceptual model & reference architecture, (2020) https://policycloud.eu/publications/deliverables/d22-conceptual-model-reference-architecture.  

[15] H2020 Mobile Age, Deliverable D2.9 – OSCPSEP API Publication and Platform Documentation - https://www.mobile-age.eu/images/pdf/deliverables/WP2/D2.9.pdf.  

[16] H2020 iKaas, Deliverable D4.5 Consolidated iKaaS Platform, (2017), http://ikaas.com/sites/default/files/ikaas/public/content-files/deliverables/D4.5%20Consolidated%20iKaaS%20platform.pdf.  

[17] Panti´c, M., Cilliers, J., Cimadomo, G., Montaño, F., Olufemi, O., Torres Mallma, S., van den Berg, J., 2021, Challenges and Opportunities for Public Participation in Urban and Regional Planning during the COVID-19 Pandemic—Lessons Learned for the Future. Land 2021, 10, 1379. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10121379 URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/12/1379/pdf. 

[18] Open data and e-government good practices for fostering environmental information sharing and dissemination, 2019, PricewaterhouseCoopers under European Environment Agency service contract # 3437/R0-ENIE/EEA.57335. https://unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/pp/a_to_i/Joint_UNECE-EEA_workshop/Draft_OD_EGOV_GP_.pdf.  

[19] Hamburg’s digital strategy, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Document Nr 21/19800,  https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/14924946/e80007b350f1abdc455cfaea7e8cd76c/data/download-digitalstrategie-englisch.pdf.  

[20] Bristol’s One City Climate Strategy, A strategy for a carbon neutral, climate resilient Bristol by 2030 - https://www.bristolonecity.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/one-city-climate-strategy.pdf. 

[21] H2020 Smarticipate, Deliverable: Open governance – making digital tools work for cities and citizens - https://www.smarticipate.eu/wp-content/uploads/Open-Governance_Making-digital-tools-work-for-cities-and-citizens.pdf. 

[22] H2020 Smarticipate, Deliverable: How to Develop a new public service – grab your potential, https://www.smarticipate.eu/wp-content/uploads/08032021_SMARTICIPATE_This_is_how_to_develop_a_public_service.pdf.  

[23] Massimo Cattino, Diana Reckien, Does public participation lead to more ambitious and transformative local climate change planning?, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 52, 2021, Pages 100-110, ISSN 1877-3435, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.08.004. 

[24] Demski, C., 2021, Net zero public engagement and participation – a research note, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/969428/net-zero-public-engagement-participation-research-note.pdf  

[25] T. Unwind, 2020, Digital technologies and climate change, Part II: “Unsustainable” digital technologies cannot deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, Tim Unwind’s blog, 16 January. https://unwin.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/digital-technologies-and-climate-change-part-ii-unsustainable-digital-technologies-cannot-deliver-the-sustainable-development-goals/  

[26] Open Data Hamburg https://transparenz.hamburg.de/open-data/.  

[27] OmaStadi, participatory budgeting services in Helsinki https://omastadi.hel.fi/.  

[28] FixMyStreet in Bristol https://fixmystreet.bristol.gov.uk/.  

[29] E-democracy, Council of Europe https://www.coe.int/en/web/congress/e-democracy.  

[30] Open Data Lab: datasets, reflections, visualization tools, guidelines and a methodology kit for the collaboration between citizens and experts. https://opendatalab.eu/.  

[31] CONSUL citizen participation tool https://consulproject.org/en/.  

[32] Open Geospatial Consortium  https://www.ogc.org/.  

[33] International Organization for Standardization https://www.iso.org/.  

[34] The World Wide Web Consortium https://www.w3.org/.  

[35] GO FAIR initiative https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/.  

[36] Hamburg’s open source digital participation platform https://dipas.org/.  

[37] CKAN open source data management system https://ckan.org/.  

[38] Socrata Open Data Server https://open-source.socrata.com/.  

[39] Portal for European data Open Data platforms, including data, studies and training https://data.europa.eu/en.  

[40] Decide Madrid, online platform for public participation in Madrid https://decide.madrid.es/.  

[41] Eurostat, European statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat.  

[42] Copernicus, the European Union's Earth observation programme https://www.copernicus.eu/en. 

[43] The Bristol Approach to citizen sensing https://www.bristolapproach.org/.  

[44] Curieuzeuair – citizen science project for air quality in Brussels https://curieuzenair.brussels/en/home. 

[45] Common European Data Spaces https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/staff-working-document-data-spaces. 

[46] European Digital Identity https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/european-digital-identity_en. 

[47] Europe’s Digital Decade https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/europes-digital-decade-digital-targets-2030_en. 

[48] Adnan, M., Ghazali, M., & Othman, N. Z. (2022). E-participation within the context of e-government initiatives: A comprehensive systematic review. Telematics and Informatics Reports, 8, 100015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teler.2022.100015  

[49] Kopackova, H., Komarkova, J., & Horak, O. (2022). Enhancing the diffusion of e-participation tools in smart cities. Cities, 125, 103640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103640  

A recent study [18] shares good practices related to e-government, open data and environmental information such as compliance to national and international standards e.g., ISO/DIS 19157 Geographic Information – data quality. In [21], several recommendations (for example, identify problems that can benefit from ICT for consultation, visualisation or feedback, make sufficient resources available for the project) are made for municipal authorities interested in developing ICT solutions for digital participatory processes and improved urban governance. Furthermore, in [22], Smarticipate shares experiences and useful insights about how to co-create and co-develop a digital public service.  

More specifically:  

• Qualification programmes, Training: E-government and e-participation solutions are built on a variety of technologies including Web 2.0, GIS, mobile and AI/ML and have varying underlying workflows. A focused training can be useful to exploit full potential of e-government and e-participation technological landscape and implement tailor-made solutions.  

• User engagement via co-creation and co-development of digital solutions can increase citizen engagement [21][22]. 

• Digital open source platforms to engage citizens online through various modalities and at the same time allow others to deploy them or develop new functionality for such platforms. 

• Infopoints, infodays, workshops, awareness campaigns can attract higher number of participants.  

• Incentives/disincentives related to ownership and participation can attract higher number of participants.  

• Public Private Partnerships can provide support for maintenance and long-term sustainability of digital solutions for e-government and e-participation.  

• Integrated action plans are useful to tackle climate challenge and multiple citizen participation initiatives can be useful to design an integrated model for decision making.  

• Institutional cooperation is essential for data and knowledge exchange for e-government and e-participation projects. 

• Data strategy can play an important role in satisfying citizens’ concerns about data ownership, security and privacy as well as exploiting e-participation solutions, e.g., open data, citizen science, data quality and standards, data privacy, and ownership and incentivisation.  

• Regulatory: For trust in government initiatives, national or local policies should back e-participation and their contribution to new policy development and decision making.  

• Geospatial information and databases: While each digital solution relies on specific dataset (with and without geo-coordinates), there are several open data sources which may be useful for different scenarios and predictive analysis. EU data repositories including Copernicus, EUROSTAT, data.europa.eu, and national or city level open data portals are a few examples (also supporting the potential of digital twins). 

ACROSS: aims to deliver user-centric design and implementation of cross-border services ensuring data sovereignty and compliance to European regulations. It leverages the advanced capabilities of cloud services, privacy preservation, semantic interoperability, and web and mobile technologies to build the next-generation privacy-aware public services ecosystem. Use cases are applied in Greece, Germany and Latvia. (Horizon 2020, Feb 2021 – Jan 2024) 

WeGovNow: has developed a civic engagement platform that supports communication and collaboration between citizens, civil society and public administrations and aims to address local policy challenges in a participatory manner. Pilots include: London Borough of Southwark (UK), Turin (Italy) and San Dana di Piave (Italy). (Horizon 2020, Feb 2016 – Jan 2019) 

DE4A: aims to provide Single Digital Gateway to access services across borders resulting in efficiency gains and reduction of administrative burden and establish culture of co-creation, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness. “Studying abroad” pilot is applied to Greece, Germany and Latvia. “Business abroad” pilot is applied to Austria, Netherlands, Romania and Sweden. “Moving abroad” use case is related to Luxembourg, Spain and Portugal.  (Horizon 2020, Jan 2020 – Dec 2022) 

GLASS: aims to give citizens more control over sharing and transfer of personal data. It is built on a public Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed framework for sharing common services of public administrations across the EU (and beyond) for citizens, business and governments. It combines P2P, distributed ledger and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for file storage with necessary security provisions such as encryption, hashes and SSO Wallet and DAPP ecosystem and uses AI for adaptive needs of public administrations. Pilots include Turkey and Greece. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2021 – Dec 2023) 

WAI-Guide: Web Accessibility Initiative provides implementation guidance and training, awareness raising and tooling support for accessible content authoring and addresses gaps in accessibility standardization. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2019 – June 2022) 

inGOV: aims to develop and deploy integrated public services framework and ICT web, mobile, GIS and AI-based virtual assistant tools to support co-creation and governance for more inclusive services for citizens and businesses. For example, tourism, tax collection, virtual assistance, disabled citizens public transport discount cards issue and renewal, and common family household public service. Pilots include: Austria (Lower Austrian region), City of Bjelovar (Croatia), Region of Thessaly (Greece) and Malta. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2021 – Dec 2023) 

mGov4EU: aims to provide an open ecosystem for secure and inclusive mobile cross-border government services. Innovative electronic identity management, storage of data and the exchange of documents are key elements and are in-line with Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) and eIDAS Regulation on cross-border identification and authentication (SSO and privacy-preserving identity and consent management). Enhanced infrastructure services are being piloted for electronic voting, smart mobility and mobile sensing. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2021 – Dec 2023) 

WeLive: an open ICT and co-creation framework aimed to adopt a more open model of design, production and delivery of public services leveraging between public administrations (PAs), citizens and entrepreneurs. Pilots included: Bilbao (Spain), Novi Sad (Serbia), Trento (Italy) and Helsinki region (Finland). (Horizon 2020, Feb 2015 – Jan 2018) 

AI4PublicPolicy: aims to leverage all stakeholders’ participation and feedback for the development and optimisation of automated, transparent and citizen-centric public policies. Cloud-based data-driven, AI/ML are core disruptive technologies applied to generate useful information for decision making. Main focus is on buildings’ energy efficiency, smart water infrastructure monitoring and management, evidence-based policy recommendations and resource allocation for departments, assessment of policies related to city infrastructure and urban mobility with economic implication. Pilots include: Athens (Greece), Genoa (Italy), Nicosia (Cyprus), Lisbon (Portugal) and Burgas (Bulgaria). (Horizon 2020, Mar 2021 – Feb 2024) 

PolicyCLOUD: aims to harness the potential of data-driven policy modelling, creation and implementation by using big data, AI/ML and cloud technologies, and leveraging user participation from citizens and communities [14]. Main focus is on policies related to agri-food, urban environment, radicalisation and policies for citizens. Pilots are set in Sofia (Bulgaria), Aragon region (Spain), the Borough of Camden London (United Kingdom) and Italy. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2020 – Dec 2022) 

TwinERGY: aims to develop a digital twin intelligence for optimising demand response for energy ecosystem (residential buildings) and enabling citizens to actively adapt their consumption to market fluctuations with the help of digital intelligence. Pilots include: Bristol (UK), Steinheim (Germany), Sardegna (Italy) and Athens (Greece). (Horizon 2020 Nov 2020 – Oct 2023) 

SHOTL: provides on-demand, flexible, affordable and collective transport solution. Alpha test was carried out in Barcelona that showed SHOTL’s market potential. (Horizon 2020, Dec 2016 – May 2017) 

Smarticipate: built on the experiences of FP7 UrbanAPI project, aims to make use of open and auxiliary data to visualise a digital model (2D and 3D) of a neighbourhood or a building or a selected area through a web portal and generate calculated feedback for planning interventions introduced by citizens. Smarticipate provides citizens access to city data and enables them to engage with other citizens and local authority, and support city decision-making processes. Pilot cities included: Rome (Italy), Hamburg (Germany), and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London (UK). (Horizon 2020 Feb 2016 – Jan 2019) 

DUET: aims to develop digital urban twin for smart decision making by providing real time information about urban events to planner so that they can react and also use this information for long-term policy making. Their focus is on transport, mobility, environment including air quality and noise, health, spatial planning and public engagement. The pilots include: Flanders region (Belgium), Athens (Greece) and Pilsen (Czechia). Their demo website is available at: https://citytwin.eu/. (Horizon 2020, Dec 2019 – Nov 2022) 

OrganiCity: aimed to provide a service for experimentation with city data by using various civic co-creation tools and technologies. Aarhus (Denmark), London (UK) and Santander (Spain) led the development of Experimentation-as-a-Service facility followed by over 35 experiments in various other cities. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2015 – June 2018) 

UserCentriCities: aims to build a platform for local authorities to shape the future of digital public services by assessing and comparing their performance with their peers (e.g., an online benchmarking dashboard). A user-centric services repository across different European cities such as openbudgets.brussels, Milano Partecipa, Murcia Citizen App, MyEspoo, etc. provides useful examples. (Horizon 2020, Dec 2020 – May 2023) 

iKaaS: intelligent Knowledge-as-a-Service aimed to build secure and privacy-preserved cross-border (EU and Japan) B2G, B2B and B2C services on multiple clouds, big data and IoTs. Scenarios and pilots included: service of environmental health (Madrid, Spain), ambient assisted living, and town management and health support service (Tago-Nishi, Japan). (Horizon 2020, Oct 2014 – Sept 2017) 

DECIDO: aims to provide analytical tools and cloud services to empower data-driven policymaking and at the same time involving citizens and local communities in co-creation activities to support better targeted policies. Policy focus is on forest fire and evacuation policy, emergency policies such as flood, food waste prevention, refugees, and power outage management. Pilots include Kajaani (Finland), Turin (Italy), Halki (Greece) and Aragon region (Spain). (Horizon 2020, Mar 2021 – Feb 2024) 

O4C: aimed to empower citizens to make meaningful use of open data through opendatalab platform and a co-design process (e.g., hackathons) with citizens, IT developers, public administrations, and start-up companies to design and develop new public services to improve urban quality and various aspects of everyday life. Pilots included: Copenhagen (Denmark), Karlstad (Sweden), Rotterdam (Belgium), Milano (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain). (Horizon 2020, Jan 2016 – June 2018) 

Mobile Age: aimed to ensure inclusion of senior citizens in mobile-based open government public services through an open senior citizens public service engagement platform (OSCPSEP) [15] and mobile applications. It supported civic participation and helped them benefit from open government data, mobile, web and cloud technologies. Pilot sites included: South Lakeland (UK), Bremen (Germany), Zaragoza (Spain), Region of Central Macedonia (Greece). (Horizon 2020, Feb 2016 – Jan 2019) 

URBANAGE: aims to support data-driven long-term sustainable planning and decision making by ensuring ageing population can remain engaged in decision-making processes and develop an inclusive co-creating strategy that utilises multidimensional big data analysis modelling and simulation with AI, visualisation through gamification, and digital twins. Piloting planning systems are from three cities: Helsinki (Finland), Santander (Spain) and Flanders (Belgium). (Horizon 2020 Feb 2021 – Jan 2024) 

CO3: developed an economically sustainable model for Public Administration/citizens interaction based on disruptive technology. It assessed the benefits and risks of blockchain, augmented reality, geolocated social network, interactive democracy tools, and gamification, in the co-creation, co-production and co-management of public services with citizens. The technologies were piloted in Paris, Turin and Athens, providing insight on their impact on criteria such as citizen engagement, value of services produced and economic sustainability, privacy and data protection. (Horizon 2020, Jan 2019 – Dec 2021)