29 November 2018
Organisers: Dietmar Lampert (ZSI - Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna, Austria), Anne Bowser (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., USA)
Moderators: B. Kieslinger, D. Lampert (ZSI - Centre for Social Innovation, Vienna, Austria)
Citizen Science is a major focus of the European Commission’s H2020 2018-2020 Programme. It is also increasingly important to the US community, supported by high-level policy including the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2016. Although citizen science has already proven impactful across all societal sectors – academia, businesses, public sector, and civil society – , much of its potential remains untapped. There are opportunities to build on existing experiences and propel citizen science on a much bigger scale into a wide range of research areas that can benefit from this participatory paradigm. In addition, more work is needed to identify the value of and concrete opportunities for international collaboration, including between the EU and US.
The BILAT USA 4.0 project will host a workshop on “Citizen Science – New opportunities for research and innovation in the EU and the US” in conjunction with this year’s conference on Citizen Observatories for natural hazards and water management. This conference will take place in Venice, Italy, November 27-30, 2018. The workshop will occupy the afternoon slot of Nov. 29.
The topics to be discussed are:
• A common agenda for learning from recent experiences in terms of approaches, tools and resources for propelling citizen science into mainstream science activities.
• Ways to combine effective practices and promote mutual learning between citizen science, other participatory methods (e.g. participatory action research), open science, and data activism for evidence-based research, decision making, and education.
• Understanding how to broadly evaluate the outcomes of participation, including through the co-design of metrics and indicators and/or open, collaborative, and inclusive evaluation.
• Identifying key aspects including projects where EU-US cooperation is critical for advancing citizen science as a widely accepted way of doing research
The workshop aims to facilitate the dialogue between scientists and policy makers, to articulate possible results if EU-US cooperation is enhanced at the policy level, and to provide input on concrete policy options to facilitate international cooperation moving forward.
Interested individuals are welcome to contact the main organiser, Dietmar Lampert.
Contact Information
see above