By the Sunflower team
Last May, at the EUTOPIA Open Innovation Challenge (OIC) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, students from across the EUTOPIA Alliance worked together over the course of a week on different projects for various local partners. Our team included Manel Mesa Gutiérrez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), Alasdair Emmett (University of Warwick, United Kingdom), Benedetta Marchesin (Ca’ Foscari, Italy), Gabriel Vincenzi (Ca’ Foscari, Italy) and Natasha Litherland (CY Cergy Paris Université, France).
Interviews with young people in Barcelona and within our respective countries revealed that existing platforms can be counter-intuitive and difficult to navigate, even for data science students. Simultaneously, we saw that young citizens increasingly rely on social media algorithms for news, where polarisation and misinformation thrive. This creates a dangerous disconnect: citizens lack the tools to verify facts, leading to eroded trust in democratic institutions.
For that reason, we developed Sunflower, an app aiming to make open data more accessible. Sunflower addresses the critical deficit in Media and Information Literacy (MIL) among European youth, dismantling the barrier between complex institutional data and the average citizen. We didn’t win the OIC, but we really enjoyed working together, and we felt the project was worth continuing to work on.
That decision took us a few months later to Strasbourg, to the final of the Council of Europe’s Democracy’s Firewall hackathon (organised with Kreativdistrikt), where our project, Sunflower, placed second out of 250+ teams. That experience gave us the push to take the project more seriously.
While five of us worked on the project for a long time, Sunflower is now being carried forward by three of us: Gabriel Vincenzi, Benedetta Marchesin, and Natasha Litherland. We were recently accepted into the Democratic Innovations Accelerator, run by People Powered in collaboration with Nets4Dem and Coglobal. It supports projects focused on youth participation in policymaking, which is exactly the space we’re trying to contribute to.
We also hope to keep working with EUTOPIA, as we’re very thankful to the alliance and its initiatives, without which this project wouldn’t be possible.
If you’re interested in Sunflower, feel free to fill in this form
