ESA Citizens' Debate on Space for Europe 2016

Just one of 22 events: ESA Citizens’ Debate on Space for Europe 2016 at the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne. Image courtesy of Swiss Space Center/EPFL/C. Röösli, Swiss Transport Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0

On 10 September 2016, almost 1500 Europeans participated in the first Citizens’ Debate on Space for Europe. ESA organised the event to gather opinions and ideas to help develop and nurture the future strategy for space in Europe.

When Jan Woerner was elected as Director General of ESA by its Member States he expressed the wish to boost dialogue with all stakeholders and to open up space to a broader public. This Citizens’ Debate translated his intention into practice, by including people from all walks of life around Europe.

About 1600 people representing a broad diversity of citizens in 22 european countries debated space issues during the day-long event. This consultation exercise, on an unprecedented scale, was organised in all ESA Member States simultaneously, following the same approach.

In order to consolidate the 22 national results into one report at European level, the debates followed the same pattern and addressed the same questions. Although quantitative results were available soon after the debate, it required more time to analyse the qualitative results – in particular the creative session where participants were asked to imagine a space project for 2046 and 200 scenarios were proposed. The data have been made available in graphical form since 25 November 2016 on citizensdebate.space/results

We are now pleased to announce the publication of the raw data under a CC BY 3.0 IGO licence, which means you are free to use, share and remix the data as long as you mention “ESA Citizens Debate on Space for Europe 2016” as the source.

In particular, we assume that the data could be of interest for the educational sector, but of course everybody is welcome to use and build upon it.

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