Innovation Tag: Communication

The Exchange was developed to raise awareness in tourism industry on the importance of serving local food and drinks even in urban destinations (Ljubljana). The project objective is to positively affect the living standard of local farmers whereby quality and quantity of local food in hotels and restaurants will increase. With this project, Ljubljana has successfully and uniquely linked tourism sector and local agriculture to bolster sustainable economic growth and create new opportunities.

The United Nations Development Programme Lebanon used WhatsApp to conduct qualitiative surveys to listen to Syrian refugees in Lebanon dealing with conflicts with the local Lebanese community. Using Whatsapp is an effective tool for collecting qualitative data from vulnerable communities at scale. WhatsApp is widely used, with 84% of refugee households in Lebanon on WhatsApp. WhatsApp's voice message function allowed us to send survey questions as voice messages and collect people’s stories…

The Northern Ireland (NI) Public Sector Innovation Lab has organised a hackathon, “Hack the Pain,” to address these needs of an underserved group: people with persistent pain. These individuals need for better information services for self-management, and the projects that emerged from the hackathon include a virtual reality app for mindfulness, a pain tracking app and a website of information on pain management techniques.

LawMaker is a lobby for the lobbyless – a free advocacy tool for those of us who don’t have a professional working for them to influence our governments. LawMaker allows Americans to (1) crowdsource ideas for new laws, (2) build voter coalitions, and (3) engage politicians to advocate for change. Our mission is to democratize democracies by empowering the creation of new laws that originate from real people at the grassroots, instead of from lobbyists and wealthy special interests.

In citizen participation projects, analysing contributions is often a huge challenge for administrations. CitizenLab has developed machine-learning algorithms in order to help civil servants easily process thousands of citizen contributions and efficiently use these insights in decision-making. The dashboards on our platform classify ideas, show what topics are emerging, summarise trends and cluster similar contributions by theme, demographic trait or location.

The Artech project invites artists, entrepreneurs, and developers to use public data as a "raw material" for works of art based on traditional arts or digital media. Being a well-known and respectable medium to broad audiences, we see art, as an original and fresh way to expose new audiences to the importance of open data and its relevance. This is the first time that a government agency in Israel has directly sponsored a creative and innovative experience of this kind.

The European Commission led #Blockchain4EU as a forward-looking exploration of existing, emerging and potential Blockchain and other DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies) applications for industrial sectors. Through an experimental and participatory approach, this project allowed first to come up with an overview of promising applications across industries, and second to co-design five prototypes that physically showcase how Blockchain could be applied in the near future.

Innovative use of social media (Whatsapp) platform to increase participation and disseminate information for the creation of Paraguay's 4th National Action Open-Government Plan. These 14 online groups were created to allow citizens from the countryside, from marginalized and vulnerable groups, to be able to participate on an equal standing with other citizens from urban areas with access to policyholders. It is innovative because it was the first time we used this platform to involve citizens.

HubGov is an interinstitutional program of innovation in Government that has the participation of institution from the three spheres and three powers. Through a learning trail in innovation and intrapreneurship skills, each institution comes up with a complex challenge and at the end of the program presents a solution proposal to this challenge.

The energy regulator of Flanders, Belgium, has launched a new interactive online tool, ‘GreenCheck 2.0’, allowing each citizen and company to check the characteristics of the electricity supplied to their home, such as the percentage of renewables, the country of origin and the energy source. This way, the government caters to the increasing demand for green contracts, the need for transparency from suppliers and the government, while overall empowering the liberalization of the energy…