Envisioning Digital Europe 2030: Scenarios for ICT in Future Governance Policy and Modelling

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Executive Summary (excerpt)

Today’s Internet is a remarkable catalyst for creativity, collaboration and innovation providing opportunities that would have been impossible to imagine just two decades ago. If one had predicted then that, in 2010, children would freely access satellite images of any place on earth, interact with people from everywhere and search trillions of data with a simple click on their PCs, one would have been taken for fool.

This report sets out to prepare a similar excursion into the future, by outlining a set of scenarios on how governance and policy modelling, supported and enhanced by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), could develop by 2030 in order to identify the research needs and policy challenges to be addressed. These efforts may also help the fool sound wise twenty years from now.

Authors’ Acknowledgements

This report is the result of research conducted at IPTS as part of the CROSSROAD Project – A Participative Roadmap for ICT research on Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling (www.crossroadeu.net) a support action under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme. In collaboration with CROSSROAD partners, IPTS prepared a draft version of this report as an input to the first CROSSROAD Workshop that took place in Seville at IPTS on 29-30 April 2010. Based on the discussion held during the Workshop, this report also integrates the input and feedback provided by the Scientific Committee and relevant contributions received during the public online consultation.

The Joint Research Centre – Institute for Prospective and Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission holds the intellectual property rights of this report.