MEETmeTONIGHT (MEET) – “Face to face with the research” is the proposal for the European Researchers’ Night in 2018/19, happening in the two major Italian cities of Milano and Napoli, complemented by Brescia, Castellanza, Cremona, Edolo, Lecco, Lodi, Mantova, Monza, Pavia Sondrio (Lombardia region), Portici and Procida (Campania region). The goal is to realize a special occasion of meeting and interaction between the public at large and the world of research, where researchers – at the forefront of all the proposed activities – can show themselves and what they do, in a simple, spontaneous, informal and entertaining way, actively involving the public. People, by doing, find themselves learning, getting amused, and becoming aware of how much research is for everyone and all around us. All MEET activities aim at promoting research and its outcomes, researchers and their profession, with a special attention to the youngest generations on one side, and to the recognition of the role of Europe on the other. With five thematic areas and five flagship topics, MEET proposes interactive stands, hands-on experiments and live demos that reconstruct the research environment; conferences, video projections, interactive games; guided visits to scientific museums; meeting occasions with researchers; European Corners; live broadcast moments. A special attention is given to schools’ pupils, for which a number of dedicated activities are foreseen, at the goal of encouraging them to consider research career as a concrete option for their life.

"In recent years youth workers observed change in the use of public space by young people. Whereas the contact with young males in Streetwork and Outreach Work was decreasing, demography provided evidence that the number of boys/men at this age was stable, even slightly increasing. Simultaneously contact with females on public places has increased. Data analysis of usage of public space partly confirmed these observations being a phenomenon in many areas of several cities in Europe.Some theories came up as reason for the development, none of those has been examined: Changes in leisure activities of young males and generally the increasing role of social media obviously seem to play a part either. A strong security driven focus with more CCTV monitoring would support girls/women taking public space and restrain boys/men on the other hand. Educational programs and labour market developments have influence on it. How urban public space is planned and constructed might have changed.The aftermath of the current Corona Crisis is expected to be another game changer on this topic. Any predictions about the impact on the usage and perception of public space are not possible at this moment, though impact is already seen; new hotspots came up in summer 2020, on several places user groups changedThe idea of a research project based on a strategic partnership within the European funding program Erasmus+ aroused already in 2019, the current situation gave even more boost to it. Therefore, we could establish a partnership of four cities (Helsinki, Milano, Stuttgart, and Vienna) where that topic is eminent for responsible persons. Every city has its unique subtopics, but the general issue was observed equally. Every city had to manage the Corona Crisis.The partner organisations are responsible for Youth Work in their cities to a large extend (or even fully). They are all involved both in strategic planning in cooperation with the respective municipality and also responsible for operations in youth work. In total, they are responsible for almost 2000 professional youth work practitioners. Key questions for the project are:Which changes in young people’s usage and perception of public space can be observed? Which general developments, political decisions and local strategies have an influence on this topic? In which way are observations of the recent year influenced by the impact of the Corona Crisis? What are possible European and local strategic approaches to gain influence on these factors? What are the consequences regarding our lobbying activities for the interest of young people? What are proper structural and methodological answer Open Youth Work can offer?In which way activities and offerings of Open Youth Work in public urban space need to be adapted?The project will deliver intense research on the questions that will be planned and supervised by the research partner and carried out by the practitioners. In several meetings we will extract both general European but also regional outcome and develop practical structural and methodological proposals. Target groups for our proposals will be both policy makers and practitionersAs the project partners has huge capacity in directly using and implementing the results into their practical work we can provide an extremely high degree on sustainability and are able to ensure that this will not be a ""Stand alone"" project but will have impact on the four involved cities at least. The intellectual output will be delivered in a way that also those not directly involved will benefit, regardless if they are located in one of the partner cities or anywhere else in the European Union."

Inequalities in living conditions and health is a reality for many of the world's cities today. It is also the context of which the project Open the door for reading has emerged. The report, Closing the gap in a generation (WHO 2005), has resulted in strategies in many European cities, of which the partners cities Gothenburg, Bristol, Brussels, Milan and Turku are examples. The action plans undertaken by these cities address the general and specific challenges to enable better livelihood and equality for all. Support for social sustainability exists on all levels, for example the UN Agenda 2030, the European Pillar of Social Rights, the emphasis on social inclusion in the Erasmus+ program. Within this framework all five partner cities are committed towards implementing actions and/or policies to support a good start in life for all children. This ambition has been the common ground for the partnership and Gothenburg´s initiative “The city where we read to our children” has been a driving force for the project’s theme and content. Early language development and reading is perceived as a fundamental right of the child as it plays a vital role in a child's ability and motivation to learn during school years. Open the Door to Reading has been geared towards strengthening the support of children’s language and literacy development. The most important resource to encourage children’s language development are the parents. Focus has therefore been on developing supportive methods to strengthen parent’s ability to support their children. The partners have exchanged innovative practices as well as developed new tools within this field. The projects cross-sectoral structure involved professionals from pre-schools, library’s, child health care services and family Centres. The aim was to share and improve existing tools and methods and in partnership develop a training manual for professionals from different fields of expertise on how to reach children and their families. Transnational Partner Meetings (TPM) have been used to share and develop competence around reading promotion. Each partner has hosted a three-day TPM with a specific theme which included presentations of good practice, study visits and workshops. Workshops around the training manual were also implemented. The five TPMs enrolled 140 people participants (pre-school teachers, librarians, family centre staff, strategic planners in education, university teachers, adult education and teachers working with multilingual families). Two Multiplier Events have been held, in Brussels and in Milan which included representatives from different academic fields and professionals giving both an operative and a strategic perspective to reading promotion. The events reached in total over 250 people, far greater than anticipated in the project proposal. The Training Manual (TM) for professionals is a supportive guide and provides a selection of tools and methods professionals can use on a general basis as well as directed at specific targets groups. Over 190 professionals have taken part in the testing and local follow-up of the TM. The project has influenced the cities' in so many ways and has had an impact at both an operative and policy level. For example, Gothenburg´s programme has inspired Bristol’s new strategy ‘Bristol: A Reading City’ and Milan has implemented a group of Reading Ambassadors. The TPM in Brussels, presented kamishibai as a method to support language learning in early childhood education which generated great interest amongst the librarians from Turku who applied for national funding to implement the kamishibai in Turku. The cross-sectorial collaboration between professionals are the most prominent long-term benefit. Milan has for example introduced a strategic multi-stakeholder group, composed of the early childhood services area, library area and the Health Department. In Turku, the library sector has set up a new network between pre-schools, child welfare, NGOs, church, children culture planner, and director of early childhood education. The TM as an educational tool will also have long-term benefits within the cities. Supporting a continuation of reading promotion and the knowledge amongst professionals on the importance of early intervention and child literacy support. This is expected to have a long-term effect in the form of new co-designed approaches.The partner cities are now also better equipped to adapted reading promotion to meet the needs of children and parents. There is greater insight into steps needed to stimulate reading and literacy from a very early age and better understanding of the needs and challenges facing vulnerable families and their children. Hopefully, the knowledge and practices from this partnership, will lead to greater opportunities for young children, especially those children growing up in a non-literary environment. By supporting children’s learning conditions, we can contribute to the greater goal; social equality.

OpenCare prototypes a community-driven model of addressing social and health care, and explore its implications at scale. It draws on three elements: advances in collective intelligence research, to lend coherence and summarize large-scale online debates; advances in digital fabrication and cheap-and-open hardware technology; and the rise of a global hacker community, willing and able to look for solutions to care problems. We explore the potential of this approach to deliver innovative, human-centric care solutions that combine the low bureaucratization and low overhead of communities with the scientific knowledge and technical skills associated to state- and market-provided professional care. OpenCare orchestrates an open-to-all, community-driven process for addressing care issues, recruiting its participants from existing communities innovating at the edge of society (among others, hackers, artists, activists, designers). This entails the complete design cycle of sensemaking => selection of a problem-solution pair => prototype => testing => evaluation at scale; each step of the cycle will be radically open, with the debate happening online and the fabrication happening in hackerspaces and fully documented. We release open data and deploy onto them state-of-the-art analytical tools for collective intelligence: online ethnography and social network analysis. We integrate these two approaches into a semantic edges analysis approach. We expect two main types of impact. The first: contributing to a better understanding of how to deploy the collective intelligence of smart communities onto sustainability problems. The second: contributing to the debate on reforming care provision in Europe by exploring how community-driven care services might integrate in the existing European care policy landscape. OpenCare is delivered by a diverse consortium drawn from Europe’s best universities and the grassroots hacker community.

The European Cities Against School Segregation (ECASS) project sets the objective of creating innovative solutions for local government to tackle school segregation in European cities. School segregation is a burden to achieve equal opportunities for all and social and educational inclusion. As one of the main difficulties to undertake efficient education policies in this area is the transfer gap between researchers and policymakers, the ECASS project has been designed as a collaborative workspace between recognised research experts and local education authorities in three cities: Barcelona, Milan and Oslo.The project will generate innovative solutions in five main policy areas: admission policies, school supply, systems of detection and enrolment of vulnerable students, communication policies and priority policies addressed to disadvantaged schools and students. The ECASS consortium is composed of professionals from three research centres and three local education authorities. The project has designed a methodological strategy to maximise collaboration and co-design to reduce the transfer gap, such as a system of co-leading and mixing teams from research centres and local government agencies. The consortium will collaborate intensely with the City Policy Platforms (CPP) from each city, which will be composed by education stakeholders, including school-parent associations, headteachers and teachers (especially working in vulnerable contexts), teacher unions, representatives of district school boards, other local technicians and policymakers and civil society organizations working with vulnerable children. The consortium and the associate partners will collaborate in the production of project outputs.The ECASS project foresees the production of six innovative products that will boost innovation in the area of desegregation education policies. These include a catalogue of indicators and datasets to facilitate evidence-based decision-making; a database of innovative policies to tackle school segregation; policy recommendations and guidelines to reduce school segregation in European cities; course materials for local policymakers and other education stakeholders; an interactive workspace for school cooperation and information packs for families.The project includes a comprehensive dissemination plan by which all these outputs will be open access and available to the general public in the project's website as well as in institutional repositories. In addition, some outputs will be included in the School Gateway portal as a useful resource for schools and local policymakers. The three cities participating in this project are facing important challenges in educational inclusion, especially linked to the arrival of migrant and refugee population. The transnational character of the project will provide extremely useful knowledge since the three cities must respond to similar challenges from three different systems of school choice and three different institutional frameworks regarding the role of local education authorities in education policy. Both the similarities and differences between cities provide an excellent context for evaluating different scenarios of causes and characteristics of school segregation and for producing innovative solutions that can be scaled up. ECASS will help to put desegregation policies at the forefront of priorities to achieve a real inclusive education. Its result will contribute to building more equal and cohesive societies in Europe.