Caribbean Ties - An international consortium of 15 countries has co-created an exhibition on indigenous Caribbean heritage. Caribbean Ties presents the diversity and complexity that existed in the Caribbean before the arrival of European colonizers, and that remains vibrantly present today. The exhibition connects indigenous peoples and present-day communities in the Caribbean. Partners have contributed to the common story that is presented internationally and have adapted it for a locally relevant narrative. The exhibition sheds light on the latest scientific discoveries. Caribbean Ties opens in 2019 in 15 museums across the Caribbean and Europe.

DEMOSOFC, the unexpected energy - The DEMOSOFC plant will be the first industrial-size Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) installation fed by biogas in Europe. The site of the installation is a municipal Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) located in Collegno (Turin, IT) where biogas is produced from the sludge, a by-product of the water treatment process. Citizens have been engaged through dissemination activities, and the success of the dissemination programme has shown that lay public stakeholders want to be involved with state-of-the-art technology if it provides solutions to environmental issues.

Science Shops – a win-win model for research organisations and civil society. Science Shops bring civil society organisations and researchers together to co-create knowledge to find solutions to real-life societal problems, and are a proven model to achieve this. SciShops is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project testing new Science Shop models and developing tools and resources to support those interested in setting up Science Shops and community-based participatory research initiatives. Ten new Science Shops are being set up as part of the project by a range of different research organisations, including research institutes, NGOs, universities and companies.

EU-Citizen.Science - A lot of citizen science initiatives are currently taking place but there is no real synergy between these individual projects. The aim of EU-Citizen.Science is to mainstream this field of innovation by creating a mutual learning space for very diverse stakeholders, ranging from citizen scientists to researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs, etc. Over the next few months, the platform for sharing, initiating, and learning citizen science will be created to enable citizen scientists to come together and share their expertise. By mapping and coordinating citizen science actions, this project will support new and existing citizen science initiatives, while contributing to the creation of a European citizen science community. It will share good tools, trainings and best practice examples and will enable newcomers to the field as well as experts to find all the main scientific outcomes collected by citizen scientists in this platform dedicated to citizen science. The project is currently collecting feedback on the needs this European platform should meet, so this session will be a valuable opportunity to hear from you, the science engagement community.

Little is known about science learning initiatives outside the classroom while it is crucial in educating and forming Europe’s next generation of researchers and innovators. SySTEM 2020 is trying to get a better understanding of the field by mapping initiatives that encourage learning beyond the classroom across 19 countries. Within 8 of these, in-depth studies will be carried out to look at how children and teenagers between the ages of 9-20 years old react to these types of environments. By including learners from minority, economically disadvantaged and migrant communities, this project will not only look at the organisations, but also the individual learner themselves. Through SySTEM 2020’s research-practice approach, new tools will be created and tested to support educators in designing and implementing flexible learning environments that depend on the learner, location and subject.

Co-creation is a buzz word that has been used widely across Responsible Research and Innovation and Science Technology and Innovation Policies, but do we really know what it means and, more importantly, what it entails? SISCODE is trying to address this by stimulating the use of co-creation methodologies in policy design. By analysing 40 cases of co-creation ecosystems across Europe, SISCODE will be able to pinpoint favourable conditions that supports its scalability and replication, ensuring its use is understood and utilised widely with policy-makers in the future.

COMPASS - Very much like a vessel surfing the seas, a spacecraft travelling through space is subjected to many different perturbations. The gravity of other celestial bodies, solar radiation pressure, or the atmosphere or a nearby planet have a sometimes subtle but always essential effect on its orbit. COMPASS (Control for Orbit Manoeuvring through Perturbations for Application to Space Systems) aims to understand all these effects to leverage, rather than oppose, them for new approaches to space mission design. After all, each time you set sail, you need a reliable compass.