C*Sci 2023 and the new name of the (US) Citizen Science Association

At the end of May, the Citizen Science Association (CSA) celebrated its 10th year anniversary in its conference - C*Sci 2023, held at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona. The conference (22-26 May) provided the opportunity to meet face-to-face colleagues in the area of citizen science, which I haven't had a chance to talk …

Geographical magazine: The Future of Mapping

The Geographical magazine, which is the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, run an article about "the future of mapping". The piece was written by Katie Burton, and it covers a range of recent developments in mapping technologies. I was interviewed for the piece, and provided information about our work with Sapelli, and also comments …

New paper: Participatory mapping and food‐centred justice in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya

The Urban Zoo project focused on the issues of transfer of disease from animals to humans, in particular in the context of Nairobi, Kenya. This is mostly a medical study, but through the involvement of UCL Development Planning Unit (DPU), issues of urban planning and urban studies were integrated. The new paper "Participatory mapping and food‐centred …

Citizen Science 2019: Designing technology to maximize cultural diversity, uptake, and outcomes of citizen science

  This blog post was written by Michelle Neil of ACSA with edits by me (yay! collaborative note taking!) (apologies for getting names wrong!)  The session was structured in the following way: first, each person presented their issue, and then they answer questions that were presented by other panel members. The questions that we managed …

Citizen Science 2019: Citizen Science in Action: A Tale of Four Advocates Who Would Have Lost Without You

Jessica Culpepper (Public Justice), Larry Baldwin (Crystal Coast Waterkeeper), Matt Helper (Appalachian Voices),  Michael Krochta (Bark).  Jessica - there can be a disconnect between the work on the ground and how it is used in advocacy. On how to use the information to make the world a better place, and hold polluters to account. First, Michael Krochta (Bark) from …

Opportunity: come and help us create the ExCiteS Social Enterprise!

The Extreme Citizen Science group, set up about 8 years ago, has developed two main technological infrastructures – Sapelli software to allow data collection by low-literacy participants, and GeoKey, a data management system for community mapping. We have also developed an engagement approach that allows for the co-production of the data collection process, and for …

Non-traditional data approaches and the Sustainable Development Goals workshop

The workshop took place in IIASA, which is located in Laxenburg in Austria. The workshop was hosted by the earth observation and citizen science group at IASSA. The workshop focus on the interface between citizen science, earth observation, and traditional data collection methods in the context of monitoring and contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals …

Papers from PPGIS 2017 meeting: state of the art and examples from Poland and the Czech Republic

About a year ago, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, hosted the PPGIS 2017 workshop (here are my notes from the first day and the second day). Today, four papers from the workshop were published in the journal Quaestiones Geographicae which was established in 1974 as an annual journal of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological …

Digital Representations of Place: Urban Overlays and Digital Justice

Summary of the session on Digital Representation of Place at the RGS-IBG conference in Cardiff. The session aim was to address the following challenge: "Over the last few decades, our cities have become increasingly digital. Urban environments are layered with data and algorithms that fundamentally shape our geographic interactions: impacting how we perceive, move through, …

Developing mobile applications for environmental and biodiversity citizen science: considerations and recommendations

The first outcome of the December 2016 workshop on apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects was the open access paper "Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science", which came out in October 2017. The workshop, which was organised by Soledad Luna and Ulrike Sturm from the Berlin Museum for Natural History, has …