BASIC INFORMATION
Short name: EMPATIA_XXL
Long name: Large Scale Empatia Evaluation
Company: OneSource, Consultoria Informática Lda. | onesource.pt
Country: Portugal
Call: F4Fp-01-S (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-01-11-S
SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS
Participatory budgeting (PB) is one of the most successful civic innovations of the last quarter-century. PB represents a powerful tool for citizens to join in the essential tasks of governing, not only as voters but also as decision-makers. The Enabling Multichannel Participation Through ICT Adaptations (EMPATIA) project aims to increase the participation of citizens, by designing, evaluating and making publicly available an advanced ICT platform for supporting participatory budgeting processes.The EMPATIA platform is an ICT platform developed in the context of the H2020 EMPATIA project, to support the transparency, trustworthiness and political sustainability of PB processes, while managing and aggregating voting processes and contents analysis through advanced data visualization and infographics mechanisms. The EMPATIA platform includes several components released as open-source2, which have been designed to be scalable, redundant, and supportive of fault tolerance and different deployment models, including all-in-one (e.g. deployment in a single server), cloud deployment and Software as a Service (SaaS) (e.g. with dedicated servers per component, or running on public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, etc).Currently, the EMPATIA platform already supports participatory processes in several European cities, including larger cities such as Lisbon and Milan (each with hundreds of thousands users engaged). Additionally, there are ongoing negotiations to use the EMPATIA platform in municipalities and regional authorities of other countries, such as USA (Boston, Chicago and Baltimore), Brazil, Peru, Mozambique and Colombia.The Large Scale EMPATIA EvaluationProject (EMPATIA_XXL) herein proposed aims at validating the ICT platform developed in the EMPATIA project for operation in high demanding scenarios(e.g. municipalities or regions with millions of citizens and significant bursts of demand). EMPATIA_XXL will focus on experimenting the EMPATIA platform (i)with different deployment models of the EMPATIA servers (all-in-one, cloud), (ii)using multiple and simultaneous clients connected to different access technologies, and (iii) performing different operations on the platform, representative of real-world scenarios. The large-scale experimentation in four testbeds (imec Virtual Wall, Tengu – Big data analysis, imec w-iLab.t testbed and the Exogeni testbed)will enable the analysis and evaluation of the EMPATIA platform in large-scale scenarios, before real-world usage. EMPATIA_XXL will implement a multi-stage evaluation considering the distinct deployment models and the availability of the testbeds, where an initial stage will include imec Virtual Wall and w-iLab.t testbeds, with a second phase focusing on the cloud deployment model –involving the additional Exogeni and Tengu testbeds for larger scale validation (i.e. considering millions of users)
