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This paper discusses issues related to digital storytelling and its use in Cultural Heritage institutions. It will demonstrate the usefulness and advantages of digital storytelling by providing concrete examples of adoption and suggest how digital storytelling may be used in different cultural heritage environments. We will identify issues and challenges and also focus on lessons learnt, all of them being important aspects for the further deployment of ICT in museums and collections.

The proactive sustainable management of scarce water across vulnerable agricultural areas of South Europe is a timely issue of major importance, especially under the recent challenges affecting complex water systems. The Basin District of Thessaly, Greece’s driest rural region, has a long history of multiple issues of an environmental, planning, economic or administrative nature, as well as a history of conflict. For the first time, the region’s key-stakeholders, including scientists and policymakers, participated in tactical meetings during the 19-month project “Water For Tomorrow”. The goal was to establish a common and holistic understanding of the problems, assess the lessons learned from the failures of the past and co-develop a list of policy recommendations, placing them in the broader context of sustainability. These refer to enhanced and transparent information, data, accountability, cooperation/communication among authorities and stakeholders, capacity building, new technologies and modernization of current practices, reasonable demand and supply management, flexible renewable energy portfolios and circular approaches, among others. This work has significant implications for the integrated water resources management of similar south-European cases, including the Third-Cycle of the River Basin Management Plans and the International Sustainability Agendas.

Digital transformation is a process encompassing significant changes in both social and economical domains because of the adoption of digital technologies. The EU H2020 DESIRA (Digitisation: Economic and Social Impacts in Rural Areas) project is working on defining a methodology and creating a knowledge base to characterize digital transformation. The goal is to support those in charge of responding to digitization-related challenges in rural areas, especially considering agriculture and forestry. This work presents preliminary activities in the project aiming to identify (i) Digital Game Changers, like Internet of Things (IoT), facilitating the digital transformation; and (ii) a robust set of exemplary Application Scenarios (ASs). This task will support forthcoming activities aiming to assess the socioeconomic impact of digital transformation in rural areas.

The growing dissatisfaction with the traditional scholarly communication process and publishing practices as well as increasing usage and acceptance of ICT and Web 2.0 technologies in research have resulted in the proliferation of alternative review, publishing and bibliometric methods. The EU-funded project OpenUP addresses key aspects and challenges of the currently transforming science landscape and aspires to come up with a cohesive framework for the review-disseminate-assess phases of the research life cycle that is fit to support and promote open science. The objective of this paper is to present first results and conclusions of the landscape scan and analysis of alternative peer review, altmetrics and innovative dissemination methods done during the first project year.