Month: April 2021

One of the key objectives of the PoliRural project is the identification of social, technological, economic, environmental, political, and other factors that affect local development in rural areas.

For this reason, the Greek pilot organized a series of online webinars with local bodies of the region of Central Greece on the 2^nd and 4^th of February and on the 14^th of April of 2021. At all three webinars, representatives from academia and business sector, from local government, as well as representatives of society (cooperatives, associations, etc.) participated. During the webinars, the effects of the covid-19 pandemic on all aspects of everyday life along with the need to support employment opportunities, local transport and more systematic public information on national and European population attraction programs in the region, were highlighted. In addition, the need to improve network infrastructure and to provide well-organized training in modern digital technologies has emerged during the webinars.

PoliRural invites you to participate in the “Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon 2021”, a series of challenges that will be focused on developments and innovations in agriculture, the environment, transport, tourism, geospatial applications or remote sensing and GNSS.

During the months of April and May, a unique opportunity to try out new technologies and infrastructures will be offered, which will be open to all developers. “Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon 2021” opens up opportunities for cooperation in the development of various solutions with participants from all over the world, and at the same time offers everyone the enrichment of their own experience.

You can participate in the following challenges:

1. How to use and improve OLU 2.0.0
2. Regional Atractiveness
3. Analysis of Drought Conditions for Selected Use-Cases
4. Analytical map of traffic accidents in Czechia
5. SmartAfriHub III – African Agricultural Water Security
6. Analysis of Sentinel 2 and Sentinel 1 time series for the purpose of Agriculture
7. Interactive collaborative data capturing at scale – technology and business models
8. AgroInfo Application
9. Agrihub Slovakia
10. Evaluation of OSM 4 purposes of Traffic Modelling
11. From Smart Points of Interest towards sustainable Points of Interest

More information about the Hackathon can be viewed here. You can also register to the Hackathon here.

You can view the replay of the Kick-off webinar dedicated to the challenge introduction of the Open Spring INSPIRE Hackathon here.

PoliRural has developed and published an Evaluation Based Cluster Map of PoliRural 12 Pilots. The diagram groups pilots according to common themes and priorities identified in a recent policy evaluation. A node linking two or more regions provides common ground for exploration of new policy measures, a task due to start in the coming months. Inter-pilot similarities help facilitate cross-border learning that regional foresight teams can leverage to see what worked, or didn’t, in other places, and why, before developing an optimal intervention for their rural area.

The Evaluation Based Cluster Map of PoliRural 12 Pilots can be viewed here.

PoliRural has developed and published an Inventory of Drivers of Change that aims to understand how changes in rural areas are happening now, the kind of changes that are likely to have an impact in the future, their interlinkages and dependencies, their importance, and the possibility of being able to influence them based on policy choices.

The Inventory of Drivers of Change has found 64 drivers of change across 6 categories, that will be used for the drivers analysis activity in each of the 12 regional PoliRural pilots. It is not by any means exhaustive. But it provides a useful starting point for the ‘drivers analysis’ activity in each of the 12 regional Foresight pilots.

The categories are the following:

• Social Factors;
• Technological Factors;
• Economic Factors;
• Environmental Factors;
• Political Factors;
• Value Related Factors.

The Inventory of Drivers of Change can be downloaded here.