SocKETs aims at developing a shared understanding of the role of key enabling technologies in society and advocating for the importance of societal engagement in the innovation process. To do so, SocKETs committed to highlighting other initiatives and experiences combining societal engagement and emerging technologies.

The EU-funded project recently launched a call for societal engagement stories to gather experiences from partner networks on emerging technologies, societal challenges and public engagement.
After a careful review made by the SocKETs partners, 3 proposals were selected out of 10. The stories were proposed by the EU-funded projects teRRIFICA and Robotics4EU and by the Rhodes University Biotechnology Innovation Centre. The successful applications are heavily based on societal engagement but use different approaches: citizen consultation, community-based participatory research, citizen science and, crowdmapping. They tackle appealing and topical subjects: robotics, climate change, and water quality.

In the coming months, Ecsite will be busy working with the successful candidates to transform their experiences into nice stories embedding multimedia elements, all as a single unified narrative to give the reader an immersive experience. The stories will then be widely spread and will be featured in our Spokes magazine. If you're not a reader yet, make sure to subscribe!

A second call will be released in September 2022 and 3 stories will be selected again. Stay tuned!