Citizen science describes science-society collaborations that span a wide spectrum of activities under many different names, disciplines, scales, physical places around the world, and places in history. Citizen science is also called volunteer science, community-based research, street science, do-it-yourself (DIY) science, public participation in scientific research (PPSR), participatory science, web-mapping, crowd-sourcing, and more. It can be global and exclusively online via games and solving puzzles, crowd-sourcing information, or data transcription. It can be exclusively offline, such as connecting people with nature or science locally. Most commonly, citizen science involves people collecting or observing in their real world geo-referenced location and submitting the information into an online database via computer or mobile technology. From astronomy to zoology and conservation to urban planning, citizen science allows professionals and amateurs to co-produce knowledge. Session moderators will provide historic and modern-day context of citizen science and review the scope of projects and platforms/technologies that provide new frontiers for citizen science.
Questions:
- Only collecting data? What scope of activities/projects qualify as #citizenscience? #scio13
- Only helping scientists? Managers, urban planners, claims adjusters…who uses the data? #scio13 #citizenscience
- #citizenscience isn’t new: what frontiers do communication technologies open for citizen science? #scio13
- Is knowledge co-produced via #citizenscience more special than knowledge via regular sci method? #scio13
- What disciplines/professionals are involved in #citizenscience? #scio13
- What types of story angles emerge from each #citizenscience project? #scio13
- How are participants recruited for #citizenscience projects?
- Can we trust #citizenscience data? #scio13
- Beyond peer-reviewed outcomes of co-produced knowledge, where to dig for #citizenscience stories? #scio13
- Is a scientific result more/less newsworthy if it came about from #citizenscience methods? #scio13
- What online tools/platforms enable #citizenscience engagement in hypotheses, protocols, data collection, data sharing, analyses? #scio13
- Evaluating select #citizenscience tools/platforms: what are their benefits/ limitations?