A 15-Strong Consortium Celebrates the Launch of PoliVisu Project

GENT, Belgium - Nov. 20, 2017 - PRLog -- Earlier this month 15 partners from six EU countries gathered for a kick-off meeting to celebrate the start of PoliVisu, a three-year long Horizon 2020 project that will transform local transport systems, making them more optimised, resilient and citizen-centric. Working with the cities of Ghent, Belgium, Pilsen, Czech Republic, and Issy-les-Moulineau, France, PoliVisu will promote data-driven policymaking as a solution to urban mobility challenges, such as traffic congestion, parking difficulties and inadequacy of transport infrastructure.

The experience of three pilots and other cities across Europe shows that policymaking can be a long and laborious process, and making agile policy decisions is easier said than done. PoliVisu will change that by offering new methods and tools to public administrations, enabling them to easily explore, experiment and test innovative approaches in response to local problems. PoliVisu framework envisages agile policymaking as a continuous process consisting of three cycles
·         Design - reconciling different stakeholders' views and facilitating experimentation of policy scenarios through data visualisation
·         Implementation – going beyond mere policy execution by including frequent communication activities coupled with reaction monitoring on social media
·         Evaluation - assessing policy impact on areas like environment, mobility, financing and citizen welfare using a range of evaluation techniques

Supporting all these activities will be a set of ICT tools that PoliVisu partners intend to use to varying degrees at different stages of the project. They include but are not limited to open source libraries for visualising traffic flows; a metadata catalogue for spatial information querying; a social media tool for monitoring reactions on Twitter; and different web-based systems for working with sensor data.

"Clearly the project has an ambitious vision and a correspondingly high potential to realise it while delivering multiple benefits to a variety of stakeholders" said PoliVisu coordinator Geert Mareels of Informatie Vlaanderen. "There will be financial benefits for public administrations and logistics companies; business opportunities for consultancy and IT firms; greater policy acceptance among citizens; improved quality of life and more opportunities to innovate thanks to the availability of new data, knowledge and tools. We invite cities in Europe and beyond to join us on this exciting new journey!"

Note to editors: PoliVisu is a joint effort of many partners. Five are from Belgium: Vlaams Gewest, Stad Gent, IS-practice, Geosparc and Macq. Five from the Czech Republic: EDIP, Help Service Remote Sensing, InnoConnect, Sprava Informacnich Technologii Mesta Plzne and Plan4All. Two from France: Issy Media and Citi Zen Data. The remaining three are Athens Technology Center (Greece), Politecnico Di Milano (Italy) and 21c Consultancy (UK).

This project (www.polivisu.eu) has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 769608.