Digitisation: Economic and Social Impacts in Rural Areas

Website: http://desira2020.eu/

Short description of the project:

DESIRA is a 48 months project, funded by the EU programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020, which started in June 2019. The project aims at developing a methodology – and a related online tool – to assess the impact of past, current and future digitalization trends, using the concept of socio-cyber-physical systems.

DESIRA will facilitate a Rural Digitisation Forum – an open EU-wide community of stakeholders with a common interest to work, learn and share knowledge about the digitalisation of agriculture, forestry and rural areas – to discuss how policies could address the opportunities and challenges of digitalisation. The the consortium will also organise 20 Living Labs – networks of stakeholders disseminated trough Europe and selected to represent a variety of agricultural, rural and forestry domains. They are constituted around a focal question and will co-develop ideas, scenarios, digital storytelling outputs, and socio-technical solutions related to digitalisation. Interaction in the networks will be based on both face-to-face and online activities.

Liaison with RURITAGE:

On 10 September 2020, RURITAGE attended the first meeting of the Rural Digitalisation Forum, where the RURITAGE Resources Ecosystem and best practices were presented. During the meeting, the paricipaned exchanged about the results of the Pan-European assessment on digitalisation of rural areas and learned about the draft set of socio-economic and sustainability indicators for measuring the impacts of digitalisation in agriculture, forestry and rural areas.

RURITAGE and DESIRA exchanged social media accounts to be regularly updated about new project results and upcoming activities of mutual interest.

Further networking activities will be developed, including DESIRA participation to RURITAGE webinars.