The Centre for Digital Citizens (CDC) will address emerging challenges of digital citizenship, taking an inclusive, participatory approach to the design and evaluation of new technologies and services that support 'smart', 'data-rich' living in urban, rural and coastal communities. Core to the Centre's work will be the incubation of sustainable 'Digital Social Innovations' (DSI) that will ensure digital technologies support diverse end-user communities and will have long-lasting social value and impact beyond the life of the Centre. Our technological innovations will be co-created between academic, industrial, public and third sector partners, with citizens supporting co-creation and delivery of research. Through these activities, CDC will incubate user-led social innovation and sustainable impact for the Digital Economy (DE), at scale, in ways that have previously been difficult to achieve. The CDC will build on a substantial joint legacy and critical mass of DE funded research between Newcastle and Northumbria universities, developing the trajectory of work demonstrated in our highly successful Social Inclusion for the Digital Economy (SIDE) hub, our Digital Civics Centre for Doctoral Training and our Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC). The CDC is a response to recent research that has challenged simplified notions of the smart urban environment and its inhabitants, and highlighted the risks of emerging algorithmic and automated futures. The Centre will leverage our pioneering participatory design and co-creative research, our expertise in digital participatory platforms and data-driven technologies, to deliver new kinds of innovation for the DE, that empowers citizens. The CDC will focus on four critical Citizen Challenge areas arising from our prior work: 'The Well Citizen' addresses how use of shared personal data, and publicly available large-scale data, can inform citizens' self-awareness of personal health and wellbeing, of health inequalities, and of broader environmental and community wellbeing; 'The Safe Citizen' critically examines online and offline safety, including issues around algorithmic social justice and the role of new data technologies in supporting fair, secure and equitable societies; 'The Connected Citizen' explores next-generation citizen-led digital public services, which can support and sustain civic engagement and action in communities, and engagement in wider socio-political issues through new sustainable (openly managed) digital platforms; and 'The Ageless Citizen' investigates opportunities for technology-enhanced lifelong learning and opportunities for intergenerational engagement and technologies to support growth across an entire lifecourse. CDC pilot projects will be spread across the urban, rural and costal geography of the North East of England, embedded in communities with diverse socio-economic profiles and needs. Driving our programme to address these challenges is our 'Engaged Citizen Commissioning Framework'. This framework will support citizens' active engagement in the co-creation of research and critical inquiry. The framework will use design-led 'initiation mechanisms' (e.g. participatory design workshops, hackathons, community events, citizen labs, open innovation and co-production platform experiments) to support the co-creation of research activities. Our 'Innovation Fellows' (postdoctoral researchers) will engage in a 24-month social innovation programme within the CDC. They will pilot DSI projects as part of highly interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder teams, including academics and end-users (e.g. Community Groups, NGO's, Charities, Government, and Industry partners). The outcome of these pilots will be the development of further collaborative bids (Research Council / Innovate UK / Charity / Industry funded), venture capital pitches, spin-outs and/or social enterprises. In this way the Centre will act as a catalyst for future innovation-focused DE activity.

Technological advances in Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, have already given rise to extensive socio-economic transformation and new and emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers and the Internet of Things, are set to further revolutionise the information and service economy, and public services. Yet, technological innovation has the potential to also dis-benefit the most vulnerable, amplify existing forms of injustice and create new forms of exclusion in socio-economic life, thus further exacerbate socio-economic inequality and social division. That the whole of society benefits from progress in the Digital Economy is national priority, both morally and economically as those who are most vulnerable have the greatest need of opportunities for socio-economic participation. Taking a Social Justice approach, this NetworkPlus focuses on how the design of new and emerging technologies in the Digital Economy, and their application, can empower, emancipate and more equitably distribute opportunities for economic development to all citizens, consumers and employees. This EPSRC NetworkPlus: Social Justice through the Digital Economy aims to bring together and resource partners from academia, industry, government and civil society to understand, explore and respond, together, to the potential of new and emerging technologies to make the UK socio-economic life fairer for all. The NetworksPlus activities will focus on three challenge areas: Algorithmic Social Justice; Digital Security for All; Fairer Futures for Businesses and Workforces. Algorithmic Social Justice examines fairness in the design and application of AI algorithms in automated and semi-automated decision-making processes. It asks how can large data sets be classified and interpreted to inform, for example, care or health interventions programs or city planning and how can AI algorithms be made less opaque and criteria used to design them fairer and transparent. Digital Security for All investigates new and better ways to model digital security that increase people's sense of agency, while meeting their security needs and protection of assets in public and commercial online service delivery. For example, this challenge area asks in what ways can online services be designed to better support people's sense of agency and trust, while assuring security in sharing personal data online. Fairer Futures for Businesses and Workforces considers how new 'sharing economy' platforms can be designed to realise more ethical business models and equal opportunities for economic development. For example, this theme asks what platforms can be designed to support peer-to-peer markets places that cater for those who have little or no assets; and what are the implications for a fair workforce representation in the digital era. The NetworkPlus will enable new ways to support effective collaborations between academic and non-academic communities and organisations through a range of activities, including a curated series on events in the three thematic priorities and an innovative and more directed process of project commissioning. The NetworkPlus will deliver curated events and activities-including symposia, hands-on workshops, theory-hacks and design and development sprints, aiming to increase capacity, upskilling and foster trans-disciplinary dialogue, knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic communities as well as. The NetworkPlus will deliver a novel curated commissioning process of activities designed to support EPS doctoral researchers and Early Career Researchers developing impactful project proposals in partnership with industry, government, third sector and civil society.

Across the UK political spectrum there is a consensus that communities need to play a greater role in local government, both in the decisions made that affect people's everyday lives, and in the design and delivery of services provided by local government to communities. With the enormous public uptake of digital technologies including broadband internet, mobile phones, laptop and tablet computers, there are opportunities to create more representative and sustainable forms of local democracy and service provision. Digital Civics is the endeavour of developing theories, technologies, design approaches and evaluation methods for digital technologies that support local communities, local service provision, and local democracy. However, this area poses new challenges for researchers across a range of disciplines. It requires researchers that are not only experts in local government and the services they provide (such as education, public health and social care), but also researchers that can: (i) understand the limitations of existing technologies and approaches to design and use; (ii) innovate in the design, delivery and evaluation of services; (iii) produce underpinning technologies that meet the real-world requirements of local service provision and local democracy. The primary goal of our Centre for Doctoral Training is therefore to train the next generation of researchers that can meet these challenges. The Centre has three distinctive features. Firstly, it brings together academics from 5 internationally leading centres of excellence already extensively engaged in Digital Civics research at Newcastle University: (i) experts in human-computer interaction and participatory media from Culture Lab; (ii) experts in security, privacy & trust from the Centre for Cyber Crime and Security; (iii) experts in public health and social care from the Institute of Health & Society; (iv) experts in education from the Centre for Learning and Teaching; and (iv) experts on planning and politics from the Global Urban Research Unit. Working together in a Centre for Digital Civics these academics will lead the training and supervision through a 1-year taught program in Digital Civics, and a carefully coordinated collection of 60 PhD 3-year research projects over the funded lifetime of the centre. Secondly, the research will be conducted in the context of real-world service provision and communities, through the engagement of three local councils (Newcastle, Gateshead & Northumberland) who will act a host partners to the research. The centre also has a significant number of deeply committed commercial, public sector and third sector partners who will actively engage in the design and delivery of the research training. These include many of the leading national and international organisations with a direct interest in building research capacity in Digital Civics. These include Philips Research, Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, Orange Labs, IBM Research, BBC R&D, Tunstall, BT Labs, Promethean and SMART Technologies. In addition to these partners, we also have a partnership of local and national social and commercial enterprises, and a network of international academics who will support academic exchanges placements which will provide an international profile to our students' portfolio. Only those collaborating partners who have demonstrated a real and substantial commitment to engage have been included in this proposal. The research training provided to students will be cross-disciplinary in nature and focused upon 3 challenging application domains for digital civics research. These are: local democracy, education, and public health & social care. There will also be 2 underpinning technology training programmes: human-computer interaction and security, privacy & trust. These 5 topics span the research expertise of our 5 international centres of excellence at Newcastle University.