Excerpt: Our bill on citizen science (that started with my briefing the awesome AAAS fellow Rose Mutiso in Sen Coons’ office in early 2014) was incorporated into the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (COMPETES) (see Sec 402), which is now on its way for signing by the President. Section 402 makes clear that federal agencies may use crowdsourcing…
Editor’s Choice: The rest of the politisphere may be in disarray, but here is a ray of hope! If you have a moment, send a word of thanks. –LFF– Excerpts: The term “citizen science” means a form of open collaboration in which individuals or organizations participate in the scientific process in various ways, including—(A) enabling…
Abstract: It is a hard reality that virtually all countries, no matter how well resourced, take conservation and land use decisions based on highly patchy and imperfect data – if indeed any data at all. Despite a mushrooming of scientific evidence and journals in the past decade, and open-access provision of many expensive global datasets,…
Children learn how science works mainly from fact-filled textbooks. The wider public experiences scientific discovery second-hand, through best-seller books, newspapers and television, as well as online formats like science blogs and TED Talks. Even for many undergraduate science students, the majority of hands-on experience comes from lab exercises which aim to support textbook learning, rather…
Summary of YouTube video: Presentation of the process involved for the development of a Green Paper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany / Demonstration of the function and characteristics of dialogue forum, the contributions of the GEWISS project consortium and advisory board, processes and results of the online consultation and the position papers and the…
Abstract: BACKGROUND: The language of “participant-driven research,” “crowdsourcing” and “citizen science” is increasingly being used to encourage the public to become involved in research ventures as both subjects and scientists. Originally, these labels were invoked by volunteer research efforts propelled by amateurs outside of traditional research institutions and aimed at appealing to those looking for more…
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between paid labour and users within the Zooniverse, a crowdsourced citizen science platform. The user activities involve the collective categorisation of large datasets, mainly relating to images that cannot currently be analysed algorithmically. However, unlike other examples of micro-tasking, there is also the possibility for individual users to make…
Surfing through the wealth of websites offering opportunities to contribute to scientific research (the so-called “citizen science”), whether by lending computer processor time for distributed computing projects or by requesting an actual human contribution, such as classifying galaxies, one cannot but marvel at the diversity of the vocabulary used to refer to users. They can…
Doing It Together Science (DITOs) will implement many innovative participatory event formats across Europe focusing on the active involvement of citizens in two critical areas: the cutting edge topic of biodesign and the pressing area of environmental monitoring. The project will advance the EU Responsible Research and Innovation agenda by moving beyond more traditional approaches into direct engagement…
Summary – Understanding Motivations for Citizen Science: Citizen science plays an important role in delivering environmental data at local and national scales, and can form the basis of scientific research, as well as evidence for policy and management. Citizen science is also an important way of connecting people with nature, and has been used to…