Pilot Action 1: “Measuring the Impacts of RRI”
The PA promotes the connection and exchange between ongoing SwafS projects and existing RRI knowledge hubs, such as NewHoRRIzon, SUPER MoRRI or RRI Tools. Building on existing MORRI and SUPER MoRRI indicator work, it addresses the need for closer linkages and cross-project learning and synergies by creating an easy-to-use template to measure the impacts of RRI at project level and share them with academic and non-academic audiences. The first version of the template was created in an interactive, discourse-oriented meeting in Berlin, during which small groups further developed pre-existing MoRRI indicators of economic, societal, democratic and scientific benefits. These have now been further generalized and relabeled into “impacts” of RRI, implying less directionality and evaluation than “benefits”. The PA group is currently working on refining the indicators for future usage, adoption and closer exchange across projects. The results of this PA feed into the ongoing discussion of the SUPER MoRRI project.
Status: on-going
Coming soon: More on this pilot can be found here.
Pilot Action 2: “RRI education”
SwafS has invested a lot in many different kinds of science education addressing different target groups starting at the age of teenagers, but focusing on higher education and young researchers. This pilot action addresses younger children at the age of kindergarten and primary education as well as teenagers. It features three different approaches on how science education can introduce the concept of responsibility or aspects of RRI.
Status: closed
Coming soon: More on this pilot can be found here.
Pilot Action 3: “The future of science? society?”
This PA addresses the uncertainty about the future role of actions that have been promoted under the umbrella of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and in the Science with and for Society programme (SwafS) in Horizon 2020. It brings together committed stakeholders who pursue lobby activities for a new and advanced SwafS-like programme and develop scenarios of alternative, probable futures of (European) science-society relations to feed and illustrate debates about societally engaged research. Thus, we aim to demonstrate how the SwafS-community deals constructively with the promises and pitfalls of the SwafS programme and of the RRI concept. We believe that the context of the social lab and the NewHoRRIzon project is a good starting point for such a communication effort. Our activities are at the same time highly policy relevant and are therefore pursued in close collaboration with the management board of NewHoRRIzon and other actors.
Status: on-going
Want to engage for the future of science? society?
Pilot Action 4: “Interdisciplinary dialogues”
One of the challenges of the current SwafS programme is that the interdisciplinary nature of the projects is something to be developed further. Participants of the SwafS social lab consider it to be an attractive element of future Europen framework programmes (and national programmes alike) to establish transversality as an important element, in particular to work on integrated views on responsibility between social scientists and humanists and scientists trained in natural sciences or technical disciplines. In the SwafS social lab we intended to make use of the NewHoRRIzon infrastructure and work together with other social labs to establish interdisciplinary dialogues, i.e. events facilitated by methods that help to build bridges and integrate views. We connected to the activities of social lab 19 for EURATOM, which is running the transversal “Nuclear Dating” event on 19-20 September 2019 in Brussels. Participants of our social lab will take part in the event and will report about their experiences and potential benefits.
Status: not followed-up as an independent activity of our social lab, but operated by linking to and taking part in the Nuclear Dating event (19-20 September 2019, Brussels) of Social Lab EURATOM.
Pilot Action 5: “RRI Training”
Many social labs of NewHoRRIzon have identified the need for RRI Trainings, and so has the SwafS social lab. SwafS has opened up to new communities by promoting a broad field of RRI related topics, in particular also in the area of education. Newcomers to H2020 do often not know how to address the RRI requirements within a project proposal, how to embed RRI within their activities. Therefore the SwafS social lab will link with other NewHoRRIzon social labs which plan to do “RRI trainings” and offer at least one training session in the course of 2019.
Status: not followed-up as an independent activity of our social lab, but we explore opportunities to operate this by linking to and taking part in activities of other Social Labs.
