Date: 24 & 24 January 2020
Venue: Vienna, Austria
Participants
This workshop brought together fourteen participants from several European countries such as Sweden, UK, Italy, Spain, Israel, Belgium and Austria.
They represented various stakeholder groups including academia, funding institutions, independent experts and facilitators.
Descriptions
In the third and final workshop of the European Union’s Horizon2020 framework program, participants gathered to discussing the incorporation of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into basic research funding, with a focus on the ERC as Europe’s premier funding agency for basic research. Additionally, the workshop aimed to extract learnings on how to support the uptake of the pilot activities. Hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, this two-day workshop consisted of facilitated dialogue-based exchange and experimental learning through posters and breakout sessions. Through these means, the group was able to reflect on what it means to do excellence research and the role of responsibility in research and funding. The multidisciplinary stakeholders presented and discussed two RRI related projects, consisting of a cultural expertise platform for legal scholars and an innovative method of facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue. These ‘pilot actions’ received feedback and support from the group and the workshop concluded with enthusiasm for the continuation of the activities. For example, for the Quadrologue, the local institution of the founder has become increasingly interested in sponsoring and promoting the spread of this reflexive tool. The discussions sparked much awareness of the importance of questioning what the individual and institutional roles are in the uptake of RRI.
Updates on the Pilot Action ‘EURO Expert and RRI’
Often times, research projects that understand themselves to be socially relevant lack the expertise in sharing and communicating their results to wider audiences, thus hindering their impact. This was the starting point for the pilot action ‘EURO Expert and RRI’, which is a practical tool to help research projects communicate their results and engage with non-experts in a virtual way. The essence of the ‘EURO Expert and RRI’ platform is a website for online engagement that it accessible, interactive, and promotes the uptake of Responsible Research and Innovation (RR) in research projects through Societal Engagement and Open Access (open data is provided by the project). In this specific case, the ‘EURO Expert and RRI’ tool aims to inform and Interact with a wider audience about the role of cultural experts in the context of litigation. There are different modes of engagement on the website currently, consisting of blogposts, sharing of audio and video content, translation of the core legal scholarship into non-academic language, and the beginnings of a database that can used for information exchange between legal professionals. Overall, the process of creating the ‘EURO Expert and RRI’ platform revealed the importance of interaction and the development of a common language in order to include RRI in a research project. The website can be used as a model for other projects that want to engage a wider public and engage stakeholders in their work.
