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 …

Extreme Citizen Science Analysis and Visualisation – final event

Today is the first day after the end of the European Research Council (ERC) funded "Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and visualisation". For me, it's an important milestone. In July 2007, Jerome Lewis got in touch with me about the need to develop data collection and visualisation to protect and nurture forest communities. This effort evolved …

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 …

Citizens Disrupt podcast on Extreme Citizen Science

Around July, Linda Doyle got in touch with me, with a request for an interview for a mini-series of podcasts on citizen science as part of the Science Disrupt podcasts. The Science Disrupt series got plenty of interesting episodes - a mini-series on Responsible Science, DIY Bio, Crowdfunding research, and many other topics. The specific …

Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Afternoon session

The context of the workshop and the notes from the first part of the workshop is available here. The theme of the second part of the day was Interacting with geographical citizen science: lessons learned from urban environments Volunteer interactions with flood crowdsourcing platforms - Avi Baruch talk is based on a completed PhD on the aspects of volunteers …

Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Morning session

On the 27th April, UCL hosted a workshop on the "Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science". The workshop description was as follows: "A decade ago, in 2007, Michael Goodchild defined volunteered geographic information (VGI) as ‘the widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal …

Citizen Science Inquiry event and book launch at the Open University

Citizen Inquiry is a new book, edited by Christothea (Thea) Herodotou,‎ Mike Sharples,  and Eileen Scanlon - all are education technology experts at the Open University. To celebrate the book, the Institute of Education Technology organised a citizen science impact symposium.  These are my notes from the day. The day opened with Eileen Scanlon covered …

PhD studentship in Extreme Citizen Science – development of data collection tools with non-literate participants

Applications are invited for one PhD studentship as part of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project named ECSAnVis (Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis & Visualisation) aimed at a developer. Citizen Science is the participation of members of the public in a scientific project, from shaping the question, to collecting the data, analysing it and using …

Into the night – training day on citizen science

Last December, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) awarded funding to UCL Extreme Citizen Science group and Earthwatch as part of their investment in public engagement. The projects are all short - they start from January to March and included public engagement and training to early career researchers. "Into the Night" highlights the importance of light …

Podcast – discussion with Liz Killen and Alice Sheppard on citizen science

Several weeks ago, Liz Killen, who is studying for an MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College organised an interview with me and Alice Sheppard about aspects of citizen science, for the I, Science the science magazine of Imperial College. This is the second time ExCiteS is covered in the magazine, after a report in 2013 by …