The press release announces the launch of the MyUniversity project, which aims to design and deploy an integrated e-participation platform to empower university stakeholders in transparent decision-making regarding higher education. The platform will be organized into a central EU portal and individual university portals, and will be developed in the first 6 months before a 20 month trial across 5 European countries. The project aims to demonstrate how e-participation tools can facilitate local and EU-level participation on higher education issues and influence decision making processes. A consortium of 12 partners from 7 countries will implement the project with partial funding from the European Community.
1. www.myuniversity-project.eu
Contact person
Name: Manuela Titorencu
Address: Anavriton 20, Maroussi 15124, Athens,
Greece
E-mail: manuela@gov2u.org
Phone: +30-210-6121340
Fax: +30-210-6147206
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
th
Athens, Greece 24 of February 2011
PRESS RELEASE
“MyUniversity Project Launch”
The project called MyUniversity: Decision making for a united higher education has started on 1st of October
2010 and aims at designing, deploying and validating an integrated solution for empowering and involving
university members and stakeholders in transparent decision-making allowing the development of appropriate
recommendations and action plans, focused on EU higher education.
A key success factor of the Bologna Process is the close cooperation and interaction between governments, higher
education institutions, students, staff, employers and quality assurance agencies, but in practice this is hard to
achieve and the process lacks the active participation of a large number of students and university stakeholders. For
this purpose, MyUniversity project will equip universities from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Spain, Slovakia and Sweden
with a cutting edge e-Participation platform so they can actively participate in the higher education decision making
process, both locally and at European level. The e-Participation platform will be organized into a super EU level
portal and the university e-Participation portals. The super EU level portal will include content from all the
university e-Participation portals in addition to its own independent Participation tools and will provide links to
these portals. The platform will be developed during the first 6 months of the project and then the universities will
trial it during 20 months among all university stakeholders at both national/regional levels.
The main target outcomes of the MyUniversity project are:
To demonstrate how to use an array of specific e-Participation tools (concentrated in a single platform) in
multiples countries at the same time for allowing people to participate in local and European level subjects (in
the context of the project the European subjects are limited in principle to the Higher Education area).
To demonstrate how citizens of different countries can benefit from contents, results and best practices
generated by other participants located abroad, and how issues being debated in one country can initiate a new
discussion in a different one, or even a cross-border discussion on European matters.
To demonstrate how easy is for decision makers to include e-participation initiatives as a new factor in their
decision making processes. The idea is not to substitute the decision making process and take it out of the hands
of the elected representatives, but to offer them mechanisms to take into account participant’s opinions.
The Consortium partners are: GFI NV (Belgium) - project coordinator, Gov2u (Greece), Scytl Secure Electronic
Voting S.A.(Spain), Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (Spain), Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra
(Slovakia), Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain), Stockholms Universitet (Sweden), University of Presov in Presov
(Slovakia), International Business School Bulgaria, University of National and World Economy (Bulgaria),
University of León (Spain), University of Vilnius (Lithuania), Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
(Slovakia).
For more information, please visit the project website at www.myuniversity-project.eu
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This project is partially funded under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the
Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme by the European Community
(http://ec.europa.eu/ict_psp).