Innovative training for LEAs: the ARIEN Project experience

In the context of the Horizon Europe ARIEN Project, the Sociography Foundation is responsible - among other key tasks - for coordinating and developing training activities and materials 📚 to support end users (mostly LEAs and BGAs 👮‍♂️ ✋🏻 ) and the ARIEN stakeholders community in understanding how the AI-driven tools created to combat drugtrafficking 💊 both offline and online work. 

While the project is grounded in ambitious strategic goals related to investigation, intelligence, knowledge, and cooperation, the training component is particularly crucial - and from our standpoint challenging - because in our view it goes beyond simple skill-building. 

Our consolidated experience in complex projects focusing on law enforcement, technologies and crime confirms the importance to address a deeper need: creating a continuous dialogue, supported by facilitating techniques, with the people expected to use these technologies to explore how they can be effectively used at an operational level. 

In fact, in an environment where rapid technological advancements, including cutting-edge AI functionalities, are constantly emerging, there is a real risk that these tools remain underutilized or disconnected from real-world practices. The reasons are numerous and diverse, and they deserve to be thoroughly investigated, explored, and critically assessed. Understanding these underlying factors is essential to ensure that advanced technologies -particularly in sensitive sectors like law enforcement - can be effectively integrated, trusted, and used to their full potential.

Training, therefore, becomes not just a support activity, but a sort of bridge ensuring that innovation translates into tangible, meaningful impact on the ground. Not only this, training can provide important insight to transform the project's achievements and overall experience into hints, inputs and recommendations for policymaking.

This is what Sociography focuses on: from research to actionableknowledge.

Next week marks the first ARIEN training workshop in Slovenia, and the Sociography team is actively working alongside project partners to define the methodology, finalize training materials, and design facilitation techniques for the various sessions. The goal is to ensure a dynamic and engaging experience for ARIEN end users and turning this event into a valuable opportunity for mutual learning, exchange, and collaboration.

⭕ We’ll be sharing insights and highlights from the event in the coming days. Stay tuned!