PLUGGY at the DANDELION – COURAGE Research Policy Workshop

On the 14th February 2018, the projects COURAGE and DANDELION organised a joint Research Policy Workshop entitled, “Coordinating Policy Recommendations for Durable Action”. Taking place in Brussels, the workshop aimed to improve the capacity of H2020 projects in the development of policy recommendations, developing synergies and bringing the results directly to representatives of the European Commission and policy makers.

PLUGGY’s coordinator, the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS), had the chance to participate in the workshop to present PLUGGY’s key attributes and to learn from the experiences of other EU-funded projects within the framework programme Societal Challenge 6, “Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies”.  The focus on cultural heritage and views were exchanged with the representatives from the European Commission at various levels of the administration, and discuss pressing issues and possible solutions and ways forward. These included:

• The building of trust for an intergartive culture and society; the expansion of participation in EU funded projects;
• The need for a more concentarted effort towards access, so as to enable citizens to curate inofrmation that is accurate, reliable and with referenced sources; the need to enhance the transparency of decison-making processes in the EU as it is not imemdiately clear where cultural institiutions can trun to with their problems and ideas;
• The enhancing of a participatory culture, where EU-funded projects should encourage the involvement of the citizens;
• The interconenction of educational and research platforms;
• The refining of the culture of archiving, where greater citizen awareness of the importance of archiving and the processes involved would facilitate the better understanding of heritage by society.

The over-arching ‘flavour’ of the workshop was the need/hope that the EU would commit more funds to cultural heritage-related projects as the historical percentage of the total budget is perceived as being low.