The ERNACT network hosted the "Digital transformation technologies and the future of cooperation between European regions and cities" workshop on the 12th of October, as part of the European Week of Regions and Cities. The workshop explored how disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) can be used to improve the territorial cooperation process, including study visits, staff exchanges, good practices transfer and project communication.
170 professionals from across Europe registered for the workshop, evidencing that COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated interest in disruptive technologies. A key conclusion of the workshop, however, was the need to maintain human judgement and communication capability at the centre of the EU cooperation projects while adapting to the advantages that disruptive digital technologies can bring.
ERNACT staff, after illustrating the structure of a typical territorial cooperation project and the evolution of project working methods during the past 30 years
, demonstrated in real-time the results of an internal four-week "hackathon" which produced three working applications as follows:
- The use of AI to improve the communication of project key messages.
- The use of VR to host site visits and improve interregional learning
- eLearning to support partners to follow project and programme’s procedures and methodologies.
All three demonstration were developed using affordable, available and easy to use software tools and cloud-based platforms. Inspired by the live nature of the demonstrations, attendees asked interesting questions such as: practical adoption and advantages of the tools in the management of future ERNACT EU cooperation projects; time and skills involved to create the VR models for study visits; the technology equipment and costs involved; identification of other cooperation areas where disruptive technologies could be useful.
During the discussion,
Colm Mc Colgan, ERNACT General Manager stated that,
“ERNACT will build on this experimentation by further incorporating these technologies into our project processes. Other early public sector adaptors involved in European projects can play a similar role, helping to demystify the use of disruptive digital technologies for the public and private sector in their own regions and cities".