Under the methodological guidance of the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) and through the technical implementation of University of West Attica (UniWa), a Citizen Media Lab experiment was successfully carried out on a dedicated VERITY Reddit group in April 2025 where interested citizens and representatives from the civil society had a chance to score the relevance of 20 pre-selected recommendations and leave further feedback. Each recommendation was presented to the registered participants through microlearning, leveraging visual elements for a more engaging experience. Altogether 28 people joined for the common purpose of discussing the feasibility and viability of each recommendation. The Citizen Media Lab ended with a group-verdict meeting on 30 April when the final results were presented to and approved by the most committed participants.
The results show that citizens and civil society participants particularly appreciated recommendations to implement practical events to foster interest in and knowledge about science, such as Open Science Days, as well as formal and informal training and education offers to raise critical thinking, digital literacy and fact-checking. On the other hand, less “practical” recommendations were less warmly welcomed; for instance, suggestions in terms of cooperation between scientists and policy-makers. Finally we found that the most controversial recommendations often involved some aspects of community-building where participants could not see practical benefits or found the implementation challenging.
ZSI is part of the Verity project consortium and a.o. responsible partner for the validation of the Verity protocol.
