The SURF Lab hosted the third and final working group studio (WGS) on research capability from 16 to 20 January 2025. This WGS focused n capacity building activities to enhance exploitation of the project’s results and to increase research management and stakeholder engagement capacity of the Society and Urban Form Lab (SURF).
The Consortium representatives presented updates on the SURF Lab’s Strategy and discussed funding opportunities, and shared knowledge and experiences with regards to data management, data sharing and metadata. External participants provided training on exploitation and stakeholder engagement.
The WGS included a Exploitation Workshop ed by Dr. Anastasia Constantinou, Senior Officer at the Research and Innovation Support Service of the University of Cyprus, who facilitated the discussion about potential exploitation mechanisms for the project’s results and then presented to the consortium the Horizon Results Booster. The discussion focused around how to exploit the project results while complying with open science requirements and how to make decisions about which results should be made freely accessible and which, if any, should be protected while complying with open science practices by making the metadata available.
The Consortium reviewed and discussed the SURF Lab Strategy prepared and presented by the team from Polytechnic University of Turin (POLITO). he document includes a review of the current status of the SURF Lab and its activities within the TWIN2EXPAND project, data collected and analyzed from 40 Urban Laboratories worldwide to set benchmarks for the Lab. The consortium discussed the methodology used by POLITO to carry out what is effectively a ‘systematic review of labs’ and all agreed on the high quality of the research content, constituting in itself a scientific result beyond the Lab strategy itself.
The team then discussed the importance and challenges of data management, including the exploitation of project results, data sets, codes, and metadata, and the need for data security, backup, and retention. A key discussion was about the sharing of derivative datasets and best practices to apply open science standards.
On the final day of the WGS, external trainers came to the SURF Lab in person to provide a hybrid session on stakeholders’ identification and engagement, and running stakeholders workshop using the Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) methodology (figure 3). The workshop included sessions on the theoretical background of system dialogic science, the ethics of identifying, selecting and engaging all stakeholders and the SDD methodology, including preparatory steps, implementation method and specialized software.
You can view the full report of this working group studio here.
