The Engaging Citizen Science Conference will promote knowledge sharing among the citizen science community. The aim of the conference is to engage citizen science researchers, practitioners, and citizens in sharing research, ideas, and innovations in order to make the field thrive and expand. The conference will be interdisciplinary in scope, inviting workshops, dialogue roundtables, posters, and demos from all main areas of research (natural and technical sciences, life and health sciences, and social sciences and humanities).
VA’s Fredrik Brounéus is taking part in the Dialogue Roundtable session A Collaborative Endeavour to Develop Criteria for Citizen Science Platforms at 13:30–15:00 on the 26th of April.
”Citizen science (CS) is currently on the rise in many countries. In 2018, Denmark was one of the first European countries to launch a national CS portal. CS platforms or portals are websites that display CS projects to an interested public, connecting CS actors and promoting CS in both science and society. They are not only multipliers for national and international CS projects and initiatives, but also for big transnational organizations such as the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA). In their work CS platforms often target scientists, citizens and policymakers, and interact with these diverse stakeholder groups to foster responsible CS (e.g., scientific integrity, inclusiveness, ethics) and to promote engagement in and recognition of CS. The coordinators of such platforms facilitate and moderate new developments and enhance connections between national CS actors and the international community.
As CS platforms (regional, national and international) are working at the interface between diverse scientific, societal and political institutions and stakeholder groups, they have to act in transparent, comprehensible and inclusive ways. A current challenge for platform coordinators in many countries is to determine which projects to include on their online portals, as this decision is crucial for the perception and practice of CS. This requires a transparent evaluation process that promotes responsible, sustainable CS; ensuring the credibility of the platforms as well as the trust in CS in general. At the same time, the selection process should not be restrictive towards new and alternative CS movements, nor should it require substantial efforts from project or platform managers. Currently, most platforms lack clear and transparent criteria to support platform managers in their decision process; or to help CS project managers understand why their projects are rejected and what they need to do to become listed.
In an attempt to tackle this challenge, the ECSA working group “Citizen Science Networks” is developing such criteria for CS platforms in an open consultation process. In the proposed dialogue roundtable the working group members invite interested project managers, researchers and other CS stakeholders at the Engaging Citizen Science Conference to discuss the current stage of the criteria and share their needs, concerns, ideas and questions on the subject of inclusive criteria for CS portals. The discussions and outcomes will directly feed into the development process before the final set of criteria will be presented at the ECSA conference in autumn 2022.”
Hope to see you there!
More information about the conference: https://conferences.au.dk/citsci2022
