During the second reporting period, the STEP platform development was finalized, and delivered to the pilot partners for testing. The platform comprises:
• The e-participation component
• The Social Media Monitoring Tool & Visualisation component
• The Machine Translation component
• The Data Logging component
• 2 Mobile applications (for Android and iOS)
The work which started in the first reporting period on the co-design of the STEP platform with young people and policy-makers/public officers was finalized. The co-design activities undertaken with a large selection of end users allowed the consortium to take decisions about the design of the STEP platform at many levels. In some instances co-design activities helped validating original design ideas, and on other instances allowed to define novel ideas for functionalities.
The STEP platform was pilot tested by the project pilot partners, who engaged young users and policy makers in decision-making procedures with an environmental impact. In the midway an additional Municipality joined STEP local pilots, while the STEP consortium decided to implement an EU pilot and exploit the platform at EU level. STEP’s 7 pilots managed to engage 9.929 users in the STEP platform and upload 97 public dialogues within a time period of 9 months.
A pilot plan was developed on the basis of the STEP public participation framework, which combined information from available best practice guidelines and toolkits and adapted it to the project specificities.
Based on this framework, public partners were guided to define and explain the approach of conducting public participation and how this relates to the particular characteristics of the pilot and meet the needs of decision makers, public authority officers and young citizens. This process resulted in the formation of local pilot plans.
After training the public officers on the use of the platform and testing it internally with a core group of users, the platform was launched to the public. Public dialogues were set up and promoted by public authorities, and young citizens were engaged according to the engagement strategy develop in Period 1. The practical recommendations which arose from the engagement strategy were taken into account not only for the formation of the local pilot plans, but also when the monitoring of the pilots was performed.
The STEP platform was actively disseminated by pilot partners according to the local dissemination plans. Stakeholders in pilot areas were involved though a core group of users which proposed potential methods of engaging young people through local dissemination activities and events.
During the pilot operation there was continuous feedback from users to the technical team. Adaptations to the platform were made, and new features were developed.
STEP was evaluated based on three perspectives: process, system, and outcomes. There was an intermediate evaluation on the mid-way process of the pilot operation, and a final evaluation at the end. It was planned around a questionnaire with young people and policy makers (this second only for the final evaluation), qualitative interviews and users’ self-reporting activities. In particular the questionnaire questions were mapped onto the STEP project core objectives. The data analysis conducted for this evaluation shows positive results for STEP in the achievement of the project objectives. STEP is indeed seen by both Young People and Policy Makers as a useful platform for the conduction of e-Participation on environmental issues and the actors generally said they would use the platform again and would suggest its use to their respective peers.
Lessons learnt during the execution of the project on what are the opportunities and the challenges of conducting e-Participation have been identified, and distilled in practical recommendations composing a possible Roadmap for Public Authorities wishing to conduct their own e-Participation processes.
The initial exploitation strategy and business plan to take the STEP outputs to the market were developed in parallel to the pilot operation, defining the STEP exploitable outputs, such as the STEP e-participation platform and App, as well as the partners’ vision to use the knowledge and outcomes of the project.
