PoliRural intends to transform rural policy, avoiding the pitfalls of old practices and advancing new knowledge fit for the post-2020 society. To contribute to this, PoliRural is designing a multi-governance policy Innovation Hub that makes all regional stakeholders active participants, fostering cross-sharing of knowledge and building a strong enabling stakeholder community for the rural ecosystem.
The aim of the Polirural Innovation Hub is to offer a public user interface and introduction to the innovations of the project. It will be a central and virtual space, where all stakeholders (policymakers, public servant, regional development agencies, NGO, citizens, scientists, developers, data experts, planners) will meet and share their needs and achievements to improve policy and decision making on local, regional and eventually national level. The core of the Innovation Hub will be the Digital Innovation Hub platform, which will support the sharing of information with other projects and initiatives.
To this end, the Polirural Digital Innovation Hub will provide four distinctive sections, or spaces, that cater for both internal and external users:
- An interaction space with forums, dialogue and Wiki capabilities to support stakeholder interaction;
- A learning space for Massive Open Online Courses to facilitate dissemination and uptake of knowledge and methodology developed through the project;
- An experimentation space for testing analytics and visualization including text mining and system dynamics based on real data;
- A development and hosting space for creating virtual instances of the shared reference to be used by each pilot when developing their applications.
In conclusion, the Innovation Hub will be the main Information and Communication Technology (ICT) vehicle for interactive knowledge sharing, and will host all results generated by the project. The Innovation Hub will act as a gateway to PoliRural pilot activities, creating innovative tools aimed at making rural areas and professions more attractive.