Broadening the Range Of Awareness in Data protection (BROAD)

CMCS was the coordinating institution of the EU-funded project Broadening the Range Of Awareness in Data protection (BROAD), which was carried out between  January 2009 and July 2010.  

The 18-month project was a collaborative effort of Hungarian and Dutch not-for-profit organisations to raise awareness in the area of data protection and information privacy by using innovative means and methods.

The partners in this project were:

The three action areas of BROAD were:

  1. surveying target groups and feeding back the results to professional and common knowledge;
  2. establishing an internet forum in the intersection of IT and privacy;
  3. and producing and  disseminating professional and amateur creative products, such as videoclips and "positive clichés"

The first action area of BROAD focused on exploring the opinion, values and attitudes of those target groups which exert a decisive impact on the possibilities and limitations of people's privacy in today's "information society" (multipliers), and feeding back the results to the target groups' professional forums and formation, and to common knowledge. To achieve this objective, in both countries face-to-face interviews and a dedicated online survey were conducted in two specific target groups, namely, IT professionals and their principals (bureaucrats/decision makers, business managers).

In the second action area a tri-lingual (English, Dutch, Hungarian) internet portal was created with blog and forum functions. It served as a forum for discussing, publishing and sharing ideas and works the subject of which are the impact of new technologies on information privacy, privacy-invasive technologies, and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs).

The third action area attracted creative artists which produce high artistic and technical quality videoclips, and amateurs for whom a contest was announced for submitting, among others, recordings made by mobile telephones, digital montages, cartoons etc. All visual products created in this activity were made available for sharing and distribution under a Creative Commons license, and also  disseminated through YouTube, Flickr and other file sharing sites. 

The BROAD project incorporated lasting elements, notably the findings of the survey, the Internet forums and online content, which will be available as a model for adaptation in other Member States. Videos and other creative works were widely distributed and remain topical beyond the period of the BROAD project.

The project was funded under the unded under the European Commission's special Fundamental Rights and Citizenship program.