On October 8-10th, KMi hosted the kick off meeting of the new DecarboNet project, which is a three year, €2M project funded by the EU to study behaviour change towards energy consumption.
The premise of the project is that the lack of collective awareness negatively impacts perceived personal efficacy, which hampers efforts to address societal problems. DecarboNet is a multidisciplinary effort to tackle this problem by identifying determinants of collective awareness, translating awareness into behavioural change, and providing novel methods to analyse and visualise the underlying processes.
During the kick off, several issues and works were brainstormed and planned, including the research and development of (i) generic tools to co-create knowledge with on-the-fly recommendations of related content from multiple sources; (ii) a cross-platform social media application to provide eco-feedback and engage citizens in games with a purpose; and (iii) methods to measure and predict behavioural change, and to capture collective awareness in a quantitative framework based on diffusion models and resonance patterns in public discourse.
DecarboNet is funded under the FP7 ICT call for Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation – CAPS. CAPS are ICT systems to leverage the crowds and the emerging "network effect" by combining distributed knowledge creation, with data from online social media and from real environments ("Internet of Things") in order to increase engagement and awareness of problems and possible solutions that require collective efforts and novel forms of social innovation.
The consortium of DecarboNet includes partners from the UK, Austria, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, and will run until October 2016. Dr Harith Alani from KMi is the Project Co-ordinator of DecarboNet, and its Scientific Director is Prof Arno Scharl from Modul University in Vienna.
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