Today improving transnational co-operation represents a major task for reaching sustainable – or, let us say, future-proof – spatial development; especially in times of globalization. This applies particularly to the Alpine Space, where seven states need to overcome national borders to valorize these mountains’ massive socioeconomic and socioecological potential – in order to handle the problems that emerge in an increasingly interconnected world.

Successful transnational co-operation, aimed at sustainable spatial development, must include a broad range of stakeholders – from interested lay people to broadly recognized experts – and ideally happen on multiple scales, from local via provincial/regional to national levels. In this context, sharing information between different groups of interest emerges as a key issue. However, despite large sums invested in generating transformation knowledge – for instance, 140 million euros during the 2014–2020 Alpine Space Programme – comparatively few results reach a wider public. Many outcomes get caught in today’s web of science (and hardly trigger regional development in the Alps), other findings of Alpine Space projects fade away on outdated websites lose more and more of their functionality.

The participation of local people in Alpine spatial development can be noticeably increased and improved by the use of web-based technologies, for stakeholders are often faced with limitations that impede their collaboration with other stakeholder groups. For example: they might not be able to participate physically in a workshop – or they lack time to personally attend a group discussion at a particular day and time. Some may even have reservations about face-to-face interaction with others as they do not see themselves at eye level with ‘experts’ - and this is where WIKIAlps comes in.

WIKIAlps uses web 2.0 technologies for boosting the democratization of transformation knowledge in the mountainous heart of Europe by (1) reorganizing the outcomes of Alpine Space research – make them generally accessible and to ensure their long-term availability – and by (2) enabling interested stakeholders to reflect, criticize or comment on the results. Registration as a WIKIAlps user is open to anybody and offers the possibility to not only consume the knowledge produced by others, but to actively create new personal insights on issues of sustainable spatial development. In this way the bottom-up generation of new valuable information is supported, much beyond the control of scientific results. This will help to strengthen the exchange of experiences, views and visions between interests groups, from interested lay people to recognized experts; a process which is crucial for improving transnational co-operation and for triggering future-proof development within the Alpine Space. In doing so, four major tasks can be fulfilled:

• unrecognized synergies between existing project outcomes are detected;
• remaining gaps of knowledge on sustainable spatial development in the Alpine Space are revealed;
• emerging contradictions between research results are recognized and lead to a fruitful discussion;
• practice-proof findings in particular become more widely known and may be promoted for further use in Alpine development planning and policy making.

In order to enable practice-oriented research results to find their way into the Alpine Space – cross-border, to different stakeholders on various scales – for triggering future-proof regional development, we suggest the following recommendations :

Make your results accessible for a wider public by presenting it on www.wikialps.eu and improve your outcomes’ visibility. Follow the approach developed within the WIKIAlps project, as this will help you to transform your complex findings into comprehensible and well-structured elements. This point includes the necessity of safeguarding your findings’ accessibility on the internet, since potential stakeholders might become interested in these products not immediately after the publication of results, but several months or even years later. WIKIAlps could thus help to stop the disappearance of results funded by the Alpine Space Programme.

Many studies – particularly from the Alpine Space Programme – provide interesting outcomes with the potential to trigger transnational sustainable development. Sharing your information on www.wikialps.eu enables other stakeholders to individually evaluate these findings’ applicability in practice. For that – and for discussing or even improving them – it is necessary to describe and explain – in a comprehensible form – how you arrived at your results, which methods or techniques you applied to answer your questions or to solve your problems. This is particularly important in times of globalization, as the framework conditions may change rapidly and therefor require a reinterpretation of results.

As a potential driver of sustainable Alpine regional development, it is not enough to just present your results in a comprehensible way on WIKIAlps, which enables others to consume, discuss or improve the information permanently: it is crucial to actively promote your results available on www.wikialps.eu and to convince potential interest groups to interpret, criticize and, if necessary, adapt the outcomes. The general use of the WIKIAlps approach for presenting Alpine Space projects will facilitate stakeholders’ participation, improve the Alpine Space Programme’s visibility and thus elevate the impact of EU-funded research results.

The WIKIAlps technology not only enables all interested parties to easily find relevant information, but also safeguards the permanent actualization of outcomes, for all stakeholders are allowed to actively discuss and contribute to the research findings on WIKIAlps.

In order to guarantee the long-term availability and accessibility of research results produced within Alpine Space projects, the presentation of outcomes on www.WIKIAlps.eu after finishing an Alpine Space project should become an obligatory step in future.

Apart from the obligation to disseminate future project outcomes, also former project partners should be actively invited and motivated to make their findings visible and discussable on the WIKIAlps platform, as many of their results are not accessible anymore on the internet.

The Alpine Space programme and its managing authorities are therefore recommended to take responsibility for the future maintenance of WIKIAlps in order to promote the democratization of knowledge on the Alpine Space, to allow the permanent actualization and discussion of these results and thus to further make EU-funded research outcomes drive sustainable and transnational spatial development.