STEP

Societal and Political Engagement of Young People in Environmental Issues

STEP is a digital web Platform (available also as a mobile app) enabling youth Societal and Political e-Participation in decision-making procedures concerning environmental issues.

The STEP platform brings together several ideas and technologies with the goal to engage Young European Citizens and Public Authorities in decision making about environmental strategies, policies, plans, programmes, laws, and projects.

The platform uses social media and web mining technologies that enable young people to view personalized and enriched information relevant to the topic of their interest. Information is filtered through multiple social media and web sources, such as Facebook, twitter, and so on, and presented in a single unified environment. This tool eliminates the need to search for content on multiple platforms, or navigate through the overflow of information available. Additionally, STEP is enhanced with web/social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualization features, which will promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making process on environmental issues

Six agencies have pilot tested the STEP solution in real contexts in 4 European Countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Pilots were implemented with the direct participation of one regional authority, four municipalities, and one association of municipalities, and included decision-making procedures on significant environmental questions.