IA4SI was a project co-funded by the European Commission, under the FP7 Coordination and Support Action – ICT-2013.5.5 Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation. The main aim of IA4SI was to develop a structured methodology able to evaluate the potential socio-political, economic and environmental impacts of collective awareness platforms for sustainability and social innovation. The methodology mapped key characteristics able to determine a wider uptake of the Collective Awareness Platforms (CAP) initiatives at wider social level.
IA4SI supported and offered opportunities for knowledge exchange and synergies development to CAP projects. It did so by:
- Developing a socio-economic impact assessment methodologies for the specific field of social innovation;
- Offered three online tools for impact self-assessment, enabling projects to understand and improve their impacts. The three tools targeted to: the projects, their users and European citizens that were engaged in the evaluation of the projects by voting;
- Identifying best practices and supporting them in reaching the planned impact on communities;
- Creating synergies and coordination between funded projects on social innovation;
- Engaging European citizens in the evaluation of social innovation projects’ outputs and in becoming aware of the potentialities of the social innovation approach;
- Developing policy recommendation and a research roadmap for integrating different initiatives with the final aim of increasing their impact on communities and their capability to address societal challenges.
In developing the methodology, IA4SI followed a participatory process, in which CAP projects were engaged in the variables definition and validation. In this way, the methodology better reflected the specificities of social innovation projects and better adapted to their needs. Engaging CAP projects in the methodology development fostered a stronger sense of ownership toward the methodology and make its uptake and its sustainability easier. IA4SI engaged also projects’ users and European citizens so that they wiould be able to express their opinion on projects’ outputs and would become more aware of the social innovation initiative co-funded by the European Commission.
The IA4SI-Consortium was composed of four partners T6 Ecosystems S.r.l (Italy), Eurokleis S.r.l (Italy), IMinds VZW (Belgium) and Athens Technology Center S.A. (Greece).
ATC was one of the main Technology Providers in IA4SI, mainly involved in the development of the EU citizens’ engagement platform. In particular, ATC was responsible for the analysis, implementation and technical testing of the citizens engagement platform, which supported European citizens in the evaluation of the CAP projects.
The project started in October 2013 and had a duration of 30 months.
