Karel Charvat1, Jiri Kvapil1, Petr Uhlir1, Marek Splichal1, Frantisek Zadrazil1, Petr Vacha1, Raitis Berzins2, Runar Bergheim3, Hana Kubickova4, Sarah Velten4, Sarka Horakova5

1Czech Centre for Science and Society (CCSS), 2Baltic Open Solution Center (BOSC), 3AVINET, 4Plan4all (P4all), 5Club of Ossiach (CoO)

Rural areas in Europe are at risk due to depopulation, failing generation renewal, and a multitude of influences ranging from market-based, regulatory, to societal and climate changes. As a result, current rural policy is no longer keeping pace with these changes. PoliRural project propose an advanced rural policy development framework in order to deliver more accurate foresight for rural regions, contributing to new and enhanced policy interventions. The proposed framework combines new quantitative and qualitative epistemological approaches, previously unused unstructured data with traditional research information, grassroot perspective with expert knowledge, current situation analysis with forward looking activities.

As one tool, which has to help to better formulate policies is PoliRural Digital Innovation Hub. A Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) is a multi-actor ecosystem that supports communities in their digital transformation by providing a broad variety of services from a one-stop shop. PoliRural DIH is a member of the DIH network of the SmartAgriHubs project.    

The purpose of the PoliRural Digital Innovation Hub is to design and develop an intelligent innovation center not only for agriculture. This DIH should integrate technology, datasets and libraries in one infrastructure with a complex user-oriented portal in the cloud environment. The user portal should provide general principles of the content management framework as well as principles of social space by providing a blog, forum, science shop, wiki pages etc. The DIH should be able to connect end users with developers or researchers to improve the impact of the demo applications or case studies by short-chain feedback from end-users. End users can join larger communities around the DIH to get advice, cooperation potential and access to modern technologies utilization. DIH is open for registration, so everyone can become a regular user and use all supported functionality and tools.

One of the principles is to connect ordinary users with developers and researchers. The second principle is the integration of demo applications, where users, developers and researchers will be able to collaborate, create and test new solutions and experiments.