CODE Europe is a project about empowering citizens to co-create policies with decision makers through Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a participatory democracy mechanism that takes advantage of the availability of technological solutions to solicit and analyse “the wisdom of the crowd”. We want to empower citizens by giving them the opportunity to learn from each other, collaborate and participate in the decision-making.

Your opinion about air quality in your city, matters!

Through answering our questionnaire, you contribute to crowd-sourcing the best ideas for legislation that works to tackle pollution, clean up our air and ensure healthy air quality for everyone. Your answers will be saved anonymously.

Participate & express your opinion in this form.

Why we need your help?

Clean air is essential to our everyday health and well-being – in fact, access to it is viewed as a human right. However, the reality for too many citizens across the EU and beyond is that exposure to unhealthy air quality is a daily experience.

Air pollution is a far-reaching, transnational problem. This is why solutions to tackle it and achieve healthy air quality need to be just as far-reaching and consider the views of people from all over Europe.

Be part of the solution to air pollution! Through answering our questionnaire, you contribute to crowdsourcing the best ideas for legislation that works to tackle pollution, clean up our air and ensure healthy air quality for everyone.

What is crowd-sourcing?

Crowdsourcing is simply a way of solving problems and producing things by connecting online with people that otherwise you wouldn’t know.

Learn about our project:

CODE Europe is a transnational experimentation of e-democracy platforms for the co-creation of policies and a research project on e-participation. The project aims to allow citizens to co-produce solutions for Europe on the subject of ‘air quality’ through the method of crowd-sourcing legislation in five different countries, to implement a Digital Dashboard for social listening^* in order to gather online opinions on the issue of ‘air quality’ and to develop a universally applicable methodology for the assessment of e-participation experiences and ethical guidelines for social listening.

The CODE Europe project is piloting a Crowd-sourcing activity in five European countries on the subject of air quality. We have chosen this specific topic because of its transnational nature and the problems associated with it, as it has been estimated to be responsible for more than 400.000 premature deaths each year.

The consortium has four technological partners (ManaBalss.lv, Citizens Foundation, OneSource, SciFY) who will design and develop a unique platform which will be used for the implementation of four crowdsourcing phases:

1. Phase ‘Problem Mapping’ (January-March 2022) – Citizens are identify problems related to air quality that they encounter in their daily life.
2. Phase ‘Problem Solving’ – Citizens’ will propose solutions to the ‘air quality’ problems they have mapped in Phase 1.
3. Phase ‘Ideas Selection’ – Citizens will evaluate the solutions proposed in Phase 2 in order to highlight the most popular ideas and priorities for European policy-makers
4. Phase ‘Policy Formulation’ – Based on the previous phases, citizens will formulate policy proposals on ‘air quality’ with experts in the field and guided by the European Environmental Bureau.

The Crowdsourcing on air quality is running from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022 in 5 cities across Europe: Athens (Greece), Riga (Latvia), Tallinn (Estonia), Lisbon (Portugal), Burgas (Bulgaria) and Budapest (Hungary).

CODE Europe will include the development and implementation of a Digital Dashboard for social listening in order to gather online opinions on the issue of ‘air quality’.

The project will specifically focus on ethical ‘social listening’ which benefits from the availability of big data while protecting individual privacy and safeguarding citizens against inappropriate access to and use of data. The consortium will test the social listening method to increase the reach to citizens’ opinions on ‘air quality’ beyond those already actively engaged in the Crowdsourcing activity.

The donor expertise partner from Iceland – Citizens Foundation, will develop the technological tool for social listening, the Digital Dashboard. The creation of the Digital Dashboard, to capture public online conversations on the topic of ‘air quality’, will include the following four steps:

1. Collecting and scraping the data;
2. Social listening mechanisms;
3. Categorisation process;
4. Creation of an automated system – the Digital Dashboard.

The combination of social listening and Crowdsourcing is intended to improve the understanding of stakeholders what the public at large thinks about ‘air quality’ and the possible solutions for policy-makers.

Activity 3: E-Participation Assessment Framework and Ethical Guidelines for Social Listening

CODE Europe’s ambition is to answer two major research questions: 1. How can we define the success of an e-participation project? and 2. How can we make sure we are doing online social listening in an ethical way?

1. We will develop a universally applicable methodology for assessment of e-participation experiences. The E-Participation Assessment Framework will allow objective comparison of the impact of e-participation projects across time and geographical space ensuring systematic and impactful knowledge-sharing, exchange of good practices and capacity building. The partners, led by e-Governance Academy, will implement a comparative analysis of cases on the basis of a jointly developed assessment framework with the goal of creating a final “check list” of success factors for e-participation initiatives. The Assessment Framework will be applied to the project’s Crowdsourcing pilots in order to collect feedback, validate and improve the methodology.
2. We will ensure that the social listening of the project will be carried out in compliance with strictly defined Ethical Guidelines. These Guidelines will ensure that the project will perform social listening with integrity and a sense of responsibility when dealing with personal data, in line with the expectations of European citizens and current legislations.

Once ready, the E-Participation Assessment Framework and the Ethical Guidelines for Social Listening will be published here.

Description of the project can be found here as well.

This project benefits from a € 1.316.367,00 grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation. The aim of the project is to develop and test in real life an innovative model for citizen engagement in public policy decision-making based on enhanced tools for e-participation and digital democracy.

Koplemjot Eiropu: pilsoniskās tehnoloģijas labai pārvaldībai un aktīviem pilsoņiem (CODE Europe)