New release! Join European MARINA platform for Responsible Research and Innovation Communities
The Marine Knowledge Sharing Platform for Federating Responsible Research and Innovation Communities, i.e. MARINA Platform is the place where researchers, business actors, citizens, and policy-makers can interact with each other, discussing innovative and responsible approaches, actions and researches, facing marine and societal challenges. It is the virtual place which federates different communities discussing of marine issues, considering the potential impacts and aiming to anticipate and assess implications and societal expectations and to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation.
The MARINA Platform is conceived as a socio-technical system, i.e. a system which combines the use of powerful information and communication technologies with effective and humanistic involvement of people.
Anyone can see what is being said in the MARINA community, can join the MARINA community contributing the discussion, sharing events, knowledge, can follow one or more of the communities federated in MARINA. A new community can be federated, aiming to exchange and spread experiences and contents while building new knowledge with a snowball approach.
More than 1000 members are already contributing to the MARINA platform and seven communities are now federated.
Join the Marina Community, Share the knowledge!
The MARINA Platform has been configured within the activities of the MARINA project, which organized and implemented many activities for building the MARINA community and federating other existing communities interested in establishing a new mindset, including the concept of responsible research and innovation and addressing marine challenges.
The federated communities have been engaged in a process of information, consultation and collaboration for building a common knowledge and supporting a process of discussion, improving the collective awareness on research and innovation perspectives, anticipating their potential consequences and expectancies by the societal point of view.
The process of engagement started during the MARINA project life. In particular, 45 Mobilization and Mutual Learning (MML) workshops were organized all around Europe, inviting people to familiarize with and adapt Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the marine sector.
The MARINA platform supports organizers in managing the Mobilization and Mutual Learning events in all phases: 1) inviting participants on line; 2) sharing new ideas and opinions with posts and chat comments; 3) sharing the agenda, presentations and the event discussion in streaming; 4) organizing on-line survey that the participant at the event can fill in; 5) sharing pictures, videos, and documents that summarise the results of each event. Results of the workshops are available in the Events section on the Platform. All members of the federated communities can visualize and contribute to discussion of these results.
Starting from the experiences of the MML workshops, Lessons Learned have been extracted, classified and shared according to the RRI dimensions and the marine issues, as well as in terms of motivations of stakeholders participation, the stakeholders groups engaged, and so on. Lessons Learned from MARINA MMLs as well as from other experiences are collected and available using the “Lessons learned functionality”.
All members of the federated communities can organize co-working and on-line discussions groups. These groups can be public or private, on specific topics and with specific purpose using the “Working space function”.
Information coming from past and existing projects related to the marine issues and Responsible Research and Innovation can be uploaded by the members of the federated communities and shared in the Database of Projects. It is also possible to share documents such as scientific papers, policy briefs, strategic documents, deliverables produced by projects, etc. that are organized in Collections contained in the on line Libraries.
Each community member can include stakeholders information in a Repository, aiming to facilitate their engagement and participation in common activities.
Moreover, the MARINA platform is also a hub of additional on line resources on Responsible Research and Innovation and Marine issues, such as databases, libraries, best practices, and in general other tools that each community can re-use directly by other communities.
The process of engaging communities is continuing enlarging the sharing process including other projects, local communities, scientists, businesses actors, citizens and policy-makers, as the MARINA Platform is going to be maintained active for at least five years, after the end of the project.