1. According to you – how can Osiris work with stakeholders?
Nowadays we are dealing with a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, a big hype is raised regarding the involvement of stakeholders in public decision-making with an increasing number of initiatives related to this issue; on the other hand, it also seems that citizens, businesses, experts etc. still feel more and more distant from decision makers. Stakeholders engagement is essential, but finding the right way to involve them is not so easy.
The surplus value of OSIRIS work with stakeholders lies on several points:
- Time: the interaction takes place over a long period of time, giving the possibility for a dialogue based on feedback and counter-feedback.
- Heterogeneity: stakeholders are selected on the basis of our interests and those of other project partners, thus bringing a wide and variegated range of skills and competences;
- The possibility to attend study visits, workshops etc. with them creates the framework where to share tacit knowledge and experiences made on the field. These are essential resources in order to enable a mutual learning process.
2. How do you do to actively involve them?
So far, we have considered two stakeholder macro-categories:
- people and/or organizations sharing our interest for the local goal we want to reach through the action plan (the enhancement of public information asset in view of a Data Driven Economy).
- people and/or organizations with excellent skills on the issues concerning the partner we visit at that moment.
The involvement is made through the organization of local meetings, attendance at the workshops organised by partners and the co-creation of a local project aiming at increasing data culture in our territory in order to create economic value and innovation from the (re)use of data.
Our goal is to foster the connection between Public Administrations, as data providers, and SMEs, as data users, through the intervention on the policies concerned with the ERDF in view of a Data Driven Economy.
3. What do you and they gain from this involvement?
In 2013 we started Open Data in Trentino, a project aiming at making Trentino a high-data-culture-territory; the stable dialogue channel with stakeholders offered by the OSIRIS project gives us the opportunity to improve our understanding of the needs of the different local actors, in order to encourage their participation in the digital single market. At the same time, the OSIRIS project “forces” us to broaden our vision and to change our point of view.
For stakeholders, the benefit is double: on the one hand, they can make their voice heard in a process leading to the improvement of policies related to their interests; on the other hand, they can increase their social capital by being part of a network of international actors.
Photo credit: Archivio Ufficio stampa PAT
