SOCIO-BEE

SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with citizen science through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between 1) the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours, breaking the cognitive myopia,  2) between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment.

The role of SMIT

Within the project, SMIT is responsible for developing effective engagement strategies for citizens and other stakeholder groups with a particular attention to vulnerable social groups. Through designing engagement tools for different stages of the project such as recruitment, onboarding, participation and evaluation, SMIT supports the real-life testing in three pilot cities; Zaragoza, Ancona and Maroussi.  Together with other partners, the ultimate goal of SMIT is to develop an engagement toolkit that is adaptable, scalable and replicable in future citizen science projects.