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Opening UP
OpeningUp is a €3.7M international collaboration that opened up new opportunities for businesses and governments to develop transformative services by pivoting to use social media channels to deliver services, and by adopting open data to better target and deliver services.
Opening Up acted as a booster project, supporting innovation across eight regions of Northern Europe. The project’s pilots, outputs, research, tools and training enabled a ‘step change’ in service design and delivery.
Social media is now a key part of our daily lives – but it has been a challenge for governments to pivot to use these new channels for both communication and for service delivery. The challenge for governments and companies is to create custom tools and approaches to work with these new channels, and to integrate their services with social networks.
At the same time that channels and platforms are opening up between citizens, businesses and governments, there is an increasing move toward the opening up of information through the formal and informal release of large datasets. Citizens, businesses and governments need to develop both the technical skills and organisational skills to work with this material to become more evidence-based and demand-driven
Articles and case studies: 
OpeningUp looked at how governments could use social media to deliver better services, and how to leverage the potential of open data to deliver better targeted and more effective services.