A collaborative endeavour towards criteria for citizen science project platforms and why we need you
Daniel Dörler
Jan. 8, 2021, 3:04 p.m.
Citizen science platforms and criteria
Citizen science (cs) platforms have emerged in recent years at regional (e.g. Flanders: https://www.iedereenwetenschapper.be/), national (e.g Germany: https://www.buergerschaffenwissen.de/, Austria: https://www.citizen-science.at/, Sweden: https://medborgarforskning.se/) and European level (EU.Citizen-Science). You will find a more complete list on https://eu-citizen.science/forum/forum/national-and-regional-cs-networks-13/. These platforms are websites that display cs projects to an interested public, connecting cs actors and promoting cs in both science and society. The platforms are not only multipliers for national and international cs projects and initiatives (Pettibone et al. 2017; Dörler and Heigl, 2019), but also for transnational organizations such as the European Citizen Science Association (Liu et al. in press). In their work the coordinators of national platforms often target scientists, citizens and policy makers, and interact with diverse stakeholder groups in an attempt to foster responsible cs (e.g. scientific integrity, inclusiveness, ethics) and to increase the popularity and recognition of cs (Lichten et al. 2018; Lynn et al. 2019; Richter et al. 2018; Sprinks et al. 2015). The coordinators and partners of such platforms often have deep insights on how cs is perceived and conducted in their respective countries. They facilitate and moderate new developments and enhance connections between national cs actors and the international community.
As cs platforms (regional, national and international alike) are working at the interface between diverse scientific, societal and political institutions and stakeholder groups, they strongly aim to work in transparent, comprehensible and inclusive ways. A current challenge for platform coordinators is to determine which projects to include on their online portals, as this decision is crucial for the perception of cs (Eitzel et al. 2017). This requires a transparent evaluation process (Kieslinger et al. 2018, Heigl et al. 2020) which ensures the credibility of the platforms as well as the trust in cs in general. At the same time, the selection process of projects being labelled cs and promoted online should not be restrictive towards new and alternative cs movements, nor should the process require high efforts, neither on the project side, nor on the platform side. Such criteria inherently also touch the very sensitive topic of what citizen science is, how it is perceived by various stakeholders and how it is conducted in practice (Haklay et al. in press). There has been a lively discussion on such criteria in the wake of an opinion that calls for an international definition of citizen science to reach a common understanding of citizen science (Heigl et al. 2019a; Auerbach et al. 2019; Heigl et al. 2019b) which was following the publication of criteria for the Austrian citizen science platform Österreich forscht (Heigl et al. 2018; Heigl et al. 2020). However, experiences so far show that most platforms have no clear and transparent criteria that would help cs actors understand which properties their projects must have to get listed or understand, why their projects cannot be listed and what they can do to get their projects listed. Therefore, careful and transparent considerations are imperative when listing projects on cs platforms.
ECSA working group “Citizen Science Networks”
In an attempt to tackle this challenge, the ECSA working group “Citizen Science Networks” (https://ecsa.citizen-science.net/working-groups/citizen-science-networks/), which was established at the ECSA General Assembly in Brussels in April 2019, is discussing and developing measurable and easy to understand criteria for cs platforms in an open process. At the beginning, the process on how to find such criteria and how to stay as open as possible was discussed in several online meetings. To the members of the working group it was of paramount importance that project leaders from citizen science projects as well as the general public of the countries represented in the working group are consulted in several steps of the process. To facilitate this involvement, the necessary documents should be translated into the respective languages of the participating countries to avoid exclusion due to language barriers.
In a next step the members of the working group decided to start a literature research on characteristics and criteria for citizen science and to extract criteria, characteristics, definitions and/or typologies from these documents. This resulted in a wide range of concepts and ideas of citizen science. After several feedback loops and online discussions these concepts were distilled to 8 criteria (version 0.1), which were presented to participants of ECSA 2020 in session 5 (Networks and communities of practice). An open online collaboration tool was used to collect feedback on version 0.1 of the criteria by ECSA participants. This resulted in several comments on some of the criteria, which were then discussed in the working group in a meeting in late November 2020.
Next steps in the collaborative endeavour and call for action
During the meeting in November the working group also discussed further steps and it was decided to proceed with collecting feedback from national citizen science communities, but to also collect further feedback by the international citizen science community in parallel. This is where we need your experience, your involvement and your feedback. We would love to get your comments on this first version of the criteria to make them more inclusive, more understandable, more approachable and measurable until 31st of January 2021.
How to get involved
There are three ways in which you can be involved in this process:
● You can directly give feedback on version 0.1 of the criteria in two ways. Please keep in mind that the criteria should be measurable and that they should be applicable by projects coming from all kinds of backgrounds (e.g. from science, humanities, universities or citizen-led).
○ Padlet: you can give anonymous feedback using our Padlet: https://padlet.com/danieldoerler/criteria_first_draft. Please be aware that we cannot contact you if we don’t understand the comment or have further questions when you give your feedback anonymously.
○ Forum on EU-Citizen.Science: https://eu-citizen.science/forum/forum/citizen-science-networks-37/topic/feedback-to-first-preliminary-draft-of-the-criteria-62/. You can also give your feedback on the criteria by registering to the forum of EU-Citizen.Science. Please be aware that feedback given in the forum will not be anonymous. However, it will make it possible for us to get into contact with you in case we have any questions on your comments.
● You can also be directly involved in the process by becoming a member of the working group. If you want to be part please contact Daniel and Florian by sending an e-mail to office@citizen-science.at.
The ECSA working group “Citizen Science Networks” is looking forward to collaborate with you!
References:
Auerbach J, Barthelmess EL, Cavalier D, Cooper CB, Fenyk H, Haklay M, Hulbert JM, Kyba CCM, Larson LR, Lewandowski E, Shanley L. 2019. The problem with delineating narrow criteria for citizen science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116:15336–15337. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909278116.
Dörler D, Heigl F. 2019. Citizen Science in Austria. Mitteilungen der Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare 72. DOI: 10.31263/voebm.v72i2.2836.
Eitzel M V, Cappadonna JL, Santos-Lang C, Duerr RE, Virapongse A, West SE, Kyba CCM, Bowser A, Cooper CB, Sforzi A, Metcalfe AN, Harris ES, Thiel M, Haklay M, Ponciano L, Roche J, Ceccaroni L, Shilling FM, Dörler D, Heigl F, Kiessling T, Davis BY, Jiang Q. 2017. Citizen Science Terminology Matters: Exploring Key Terms. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 2:1. DOI: 10.5334/cstp.96.
Haklay M, Dörler D, Heigl F, Manzoni M, Hecker S, Vohland K. In: Vohland K, Land-Zastra A, Ceccaroni L, Lemmens R, Perelló J, Ponti M, Samson R, Wagenknecht K eds. The Science of Citizen Science. Cham, Switzerland, in press.
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Heigl F, Kieslinger B, Paul KT, Uhlik J, Dörler D. 2019a. Opinion: Toward an international definition of citizen science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116:8089–8092. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1903393116.
Heigl F, Kieslinger B, Paul KT, Uhlik J, Dörler D. 2019b. Reply to Auerbach et al.: How our Opinion piece invites collaboration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116:15338–15338. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1909628116.
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