Notes from ECSA 2024 – Katja Mayer’s keynote on participatory turns in the social sciences and lesson to citizen science

The final keynote of the ECSA 2024 conference was given by Katja Mayer on "Participatory Turns: The Bumpy Roads to Recognition of Participatory Approaches in Social Sciences and Lessons for Citizen Science." The starting point is the need to consider the increase "participation" across disciplines and what participation means. She covers the participatory turns. In …

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 …

Platforms for citizen science

A CRI-Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle workshop: created by Anshu (CRI long term fellow) and Simon (MNHN), from a meeting at the Galaxy community in Freiburg. I joined the design process and it was structured so the museum and the CRI present the systems that are being developed, with a scope for a discussion about lessons …

Citizen Science @ Computational Foundry, Swansea, Festival of Ideas

The Computational Foundry at the Swansea University organised two days "Festival of Ideas" as part of the activities to celebrate its opening. The first day was organised by Ben Shneiderman and focused on aspects of AI, while the second day, curated by Jenny Preece, focused on citizen science. The summary here is from the second day, …

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 …

10 years of Mapping for Change

November 24 marks 10 years since Louise Francs, Chris Church and myself set up Mapping for Change. It's a proud moment when the social enterprise that was set out of a research project at UCL is now well established, and the work that it does is mentioned in the annual report of the Chief Medical …

New publication: Participatory citizen science

I've mentioned in the previous posts about the introduction and conclusions chapters in the book "Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy" and the chapter about citizen science in universities. The final chapter in the book that I would like to highlight is my chapter "participatory citizen science". As Rick Bonney pointed to me, on the face …

How many citizen scientists in the world?

Since the development of the proposal for the Doing It Together Science project (DITOs), I have been using the "DITOs escalator" model to express the different levels of engagement in science, while also demonstrating that the higher level have fewer participants, which mean that there is a potential for people to move between levels of engagement …

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 …

Identifying success factors in crowdsourced geographic information use in government

A few weeks ago, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), published an update for the report from 2014 on the use of crowdsourced geographic information in government. The 2014 report was very successful - it has been downloaded almost 1,800 times from 41 countries around the world in about 3 years (with more …