[MUSIC] Hello again, and welcome to module four. In this video, we will dive into different forms of public or citizen engagement as another relevant intersection of policy, science, and the public. Public engagement in science and policy making ranges from civic engagement and public participation to citizen science, and other do it yourself practices. All these approaches of a good ways to connect the expertise, and needs of citizens with the more formal expertise of journalists, social scientists, and policymakers. In this module, you will receive an overview of state of the art trends in public engagement and examples you could follow to gain further inspiration for your work. As challenges in society become more complex, addressing these challenges increasingly requires dialogue across different worldviews and research contexts in science, society, and policy. Citizen engagement and citizen participation both have the same goal to improve policy and public services. While citizen participation is often used to describe bottom up initiatives. Citizen engagement is in most cases a top down effort initiated, for example by a governmental body. Officials then encourage citizens to discuss, assess policies and contribute to the political agenda setting or the legislation. Citizen engagement is a broad concept and can refer to varying degrees of influence involvement and controlled by citizens in the knowledge production process. Citizens can be engaged in data collection, refining the project design, data analysis, or in all these steps. Maybe you have already heard about approaches such as start mining, crowdsourcing, or citizen science. Data mining examines information already registered in databases for new insights and crowdsourcing relies on large groups of people to achieve some sort of goal. However, citizen science is perhaps for the most significant levels of interaction and collaboration between citizens and academics or cure. It can effectively contribute to policy making at various stages of the policy cycle, including the policy preparation, formulation, implementation, monitoring, or the evaluation. Citizen engagement is a critical way to boost legitimacy, accountability, and transparency. In the next section, we have a closer look at how this can happen, and give examples from practice. There are many ways that citizens can be empowered to carry out scientific activities and get more directly involved in science, innovation, and policy making. Recent trends are moving away from one directional communication, which Marilyn provides information to citizens, and more towards deliberation and participatory practices. The reason trend towards more citizen involvement, identifying citizen needs in dialogue with relevant actors, and citizens ownership of the outcomes, all contribute to enhance trust between citizens and policymakers. Therefore, it's worthwhile considering public or citizen engagement in cases in which new changes in policy are needed, and when the results of such engagement have the potential to make a difference. Too often citizen engagement processes are done in name only, and do not effectively or significantly contribute to policy changes. These leads to decreasing trust in policy processes, and is harmful to overall citizen engagement processes. Citizen engagement methods can be relevant in different stages of the policy cycle. For example, at the European level, the half you say website is part of the European better regulation agenda. It invites citizens and businesses to share their views on commission initiatives at key stages in the legislative process by using the tool in two different ways. First of all, through the half use a website, you can view all the initiatives open for feedback at any given time, and give feedback on a chosen topic. Secondly, there is also the opportunity to improve existing laws. To do so, citizens can send their experience based opinion via the website lighten the lord. Another example is the European citizens initiative, that is a participatory tool based on a transnational citizens initiative mechanism. What does it mean? This bottom up mechanism is intended to give European citizens the right to ask the European commission to adopt legislation. It was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty, and has been operational since 2012. Although these inputs given by citizens and organizations do not result in direct legislative action to contribute to the agenda setting, and communication of the European commission. Another key trend in public engagement is open science, which refers to efforts towards making academic processes more accessible. This includes, open data, open source, open methodology, open peer review, open access, or open educational resources. Policymakers and policy influencers are taking a leading role in promoting open science by establishing collaborations with scientists, science communication experts, and journalists. The ongoing shift towards more open science is also fundamentally transforming science communication, but strengthening scientists engagement with policymakers. Novel tools such as the European open science data cloud or the open research Europe publishing platform facilitate increased openness. In addition, such instruments facilitate the reliability of scientific input used for policy advice, policy agenda setting, or implementation. Finally, we would like to highlight an important approach for policymakers, journalists, and social scientists. Misinformation and fake news emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic brought once more into focus the importance of continuously rechecking information that travels across the digital media ecosystem. Fact checking websites and applications can mitigate these risks. The European digital media observatory is one of the fact checking hub supporting collaboration between academics, media representatives, and policymakers. We invite you to search for further regional or national applications. In this video, we took a closer look at citizen engagement and public participation as important instruments in modern democracies. To recap and deepen your knowledge, we invite you to check out the module four workbook, the center for social innovation team. Thanks you for your participation in module four, stay tuned for the following module. [MUSIC]
