Publications

Atomium–EISMD launched the citizen engagement and media campaign on the Next Generation Internet. The aim was to stimulate a public debate between policymakers, scientists and citizens to create a real public discourse on the topic and better understand the evidence, the constraints and the opinions of citizens across Europe. The campaign was developed together with representatives of European institutions, leading research organisations, key stakeholders and some of the most authoritative newspapers in Europe.

On the 18th of April, the campaign was launched, with dedicated articles published both on the paper and online editions of Atomium media partners, including Der Standard, El País, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, La Libre Belgique, Gazeta Wyborcza, Luxemburger Wort, Público and Sole24ore. Elsevier and the European Commission’s DG Connect facilitated the engagement of researchers. The initiative was also featured on The Guardian, Politico and other specialised outlets. Based on readership, the potential public reached by the campaign was equal to over 5,7 million Europeans.

The campaign ran for 3 weeks and 53 articles were published around three main topics:

(i) The economy (including businesses, employment, and skills);

(ii) The public sphere, with a focus on how the rise of social media and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is disrupting how we access and use information, while new technologies are emerging which could help reverse this trend; and

(iii) Blurring the boundaries between offline and online/virtual worlds and impact of internet technologies on our daily lives.

The online articles contained a link to a questionnaire centred on the topic of the week, which was accessible for the entire week.A social media campaign was also run in parallel with the article publications. The social media campaign reached more than 680.000 people on Facebook, with 12.222 click throughs to survey-related links, over 160.000 people on Twitter, and about 23.000 on Instagram. As a result, over 23.000 unique users reached the REIsearch platform and over 8.500 took part into the online consultation in the form of a questionnaire survey, out of which 3.514 completed the questionnaire survey in full. The launch of the public campaign followed a network and sentiment analysis of public conversations on the next generation internet emerging on the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). This large-scale research aimed at gaining a better understanding of stakeholders’ expectations, desires, fears, worries, visions and imaginations when they think and express about the future development of Internet-related technologies. Over 650.000 messages around the next generation internet, generated by 355.451 users, in 54 languages, were recorded and analysed between November and April 2017.

Download the Report

This report presents the first results of the Citizen Engagement and Media Campaign on Chronic Diseases that ran in February and March 2016 for the launch of REIsearch.

Coordinated by Atomium – European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy (EISMD) the Citizen Engagement and Media Campaign on Chronic Diseases was launched to create a responsible and informed multi-stakeholder debate on the issues involving thousands of European citizens, researchers, policymakers and stakeholders. It wanted to create and promote access to reliable information, increase inter-disciplinary and inter-sectoral debate and collect and analyse results to deliver to researchers and policymakers.

The campaign was developed by EISMD for the launch of REIsearch, an online tool proposed by the European Parliament and co-funded by the European Commission, created to be a bridge that connects citizens, researchers and policy makers on topics linked to the scientific research and to societal challenges that Europe will face in the years to come.

To demonstrate how the tool works and to launch the beta version of REIsearch, a campaign was run reaching out to a readership of over 8 million citizens (cumulative reach of all media partners engaged in the initiative), in ten European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Spain), and in seven languages (English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish). The campaign saw the participation of nearly 60 000 Europeans and nearly 18 000 responses to the survey.

The aim of this report is twofold:

„ On the one hand it wants to present REIsearch as a tool, analyse the successes and errors done during the first campaign and evaluate the methodology in order to come up with concrete solutions for future developments.

„ On the other hand it wants to present the first citizen engagement and media campaign on chronic diseases, looking in detail at the issues at hand and analyzing the responses and perspectives given by the participants.

Download the Report