STEP: SocieTal and political Engagement of young People in environmental issues, H2020 ICT Innovation Action, 2015-2018.The overall objective of the project is to develop and pilot test a cloud eParticipation SaaS platform, (available as a mobile application and through a web platform) enhanced with web / social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features, which will promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making process on environmental issues.
The main component of STEP will be an eParticipation platform which will facilitate the interaction between end users (policy makers and young people), combining trend spotting and foresight with idea creation and innovation management, and will enable policy makers to analyse and discover new insights, based on well proven analytical methods. The STEP eParticipation platform will incorporate gamification features which will increase the engagement of young users, and text-to-speech technology.
STEP will be enhanced by:

• A social media / web mining component that will present users with enriched information from emerging topics, relevant to the content of the platform they are visiting, that is currently trending in social media and the web.
• A machine translation component that will enable users to view all information available in the platform (user input, social media / web feeds, reports, etc.) in their own language.
• A visualisation component that will present the external content in a visually stimulating way, and will help policy makers to identify the spatial distribution of use contributed content, the origin of certain trends and their evolution over time.
• The project relates to the topic YOUNG-5b-2014: “Societal and political engagement of young people and their perspectives on Europe”.