The European Citizen Science Academy: context and activities
Muki Haklay
April 9, 2025, 9:10 a.m.
In this article, we take a look at the development of the European Citizen Science Academy, with a long perspective which looks at the needs for skills and competencies in participatory and citizen science over the past 20 years. We examine the emergence of citizen science as a coherent field of activity and the need for introducing people to the theory and practice of it. We then move to the early development of training in citizen science a decade ago, and the development of the European Citizen Science Academy today.
Disciplinary silos and the need for training
With the evolution of the field of citizen science and its emergence as a clear field of scholarly and practice, came the need for providing training to newcomers. Here, when we talk about training and education, it is important to notice that we don’t focus on the mechanics of a given project (such as the protocol for sampling water) or expanding the domain knowledge of participants in a given project. In this article, our attention is on the training for developing and running citizen science and participatory research projects.
Twenty or thirty or 30 years ago, when a researcher wanted to start a citizen science project, they might look around their institutions and find other people with expertise in public engagement or science communication. They would then ask a few questions, maybe look at the participatory practices in their discipline, and then attempt to carry out an activity, learning from their own experience as they go. The knowledge was specific to the discipline, with a little crossover with other areas of research and practice. Such crossover would happen by accident - not through deliberate cross fertilisation. For example, a geographer who would want to carry out a participatory project while using a Geographical Information System (GIS) was likely to come access the terms participatory GIS (PGIS) or public participation GIS (PPGIS), and look at the papers and books that were published in this area. For example, a book such as “Community participation and geographic information systems” (Weiner et al. 2002) would include relevant examples and case studies. These books and papers will include partial descriptions of the methodology, due to space constraints. Such a geographer will not come across insights from researchers in the area of public health, who were using the term Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and therefore discussing their approach in a different set of literature. If the researcher was lucky, there would be someone with facilitation experience who would allow them to join and learn from their work in a joint project. This is important, because facilitation and community engagement is an art as much as a science. In fact, the experience above describes my early steps in participatory research - and I was fortunate to be in a department with the Environment and Society Research Unit group developed experience since the 1980s in deliberative, inclusionary, and participatory research (e.g. Burgess, Harrison & Limb 1988). I therefore could get help and advice on how to design and run workshops.
Fast forward to the mid 2010s, with a recognition that the field of citizen science is worthy of a joint body of knowledge. The first is attracting researchers and practitioners from across a range of disciplines that want to share their knowledge. The creation of organisations such as the European Citizen Science Association (2013) symbolised this need. Dedicated meetings and conferences were set to allow the sharing of theoretical and practical knowledge about citizen science projects. Specific projects received funding to develop the practices in citizen science and to grow the awareness of the scientific community to this form of public engagement. The field started to grow, and the need for awareness raising and training emerged.
At the same time, a realisation emerged about the complexities of running a successful project - with the need to draw on expertise from science communication, human-computer interaction, research data management, ethics, facilitation and engagement, and other domains of knowledge.
The result is a recognition that as a legitimate method of research, there is a need to make researchers aware of the potential, challenges, opportunities, and practices of citizen science so that future research projects can be built on the lessons from earlier efforts, and the growing body of the science of citizen science (see Vohland et al. 2021).
European effort for capacity building in citizen science
The result of this is the effort to create new ways to share the knowledge of citizen science. At the institutional level, this started in the form of integrating a session within an existing course (such as a course on science communication) dedicated to citizen science. However, the range of topics and attention required the development of dedicated courses on citizen science, which started appearing in few universities towards the end of the 2010s. The wish to share this knowledge was also integrated into large scale coordination projects. In Europe, projects such as WeObserve (2017-2021), which promoted the use of citizen observatories in environmental monitoring, or Doing it Together Science (2016-2019), which raise the awareness to citizen science and DIY science, dedicated effort to creating and sharing online training. WeObserve created a series of online training modules to support the development of citizen science, while DITOs supported the first course at UCL that was dedicated to this topic.
Next, within the project that set the European platform for sharing information about citizen science (EU-Citizen.Science project 2019-2021), both resources and self-paced training on citizen science were created. Over 20 new online modules were created as part of the project, some of them in different European languages, answering a need to provide local training. The success and interest in the training within EU-Citizen.Science led to a bigger effort within the European Citizen Science project, with an aim to establish a European Citizen Science Academy.
By the time that the European Citizen Science project was designed (around 2022), the need for training became clear, with reports and explicit efforts to develop a range of training. The interest in the training resources on the EU-Citizen.Science platform provided further proof for the needs.
European Citizen Science Academy
Early on within the ECS project, the European Citizen Science Academy started by an exercise of outreach to existing trainers and educators in citizen science. Nearly 130 people responded to a survey about training and education in citizen science, and provided the basis to the network of educators and trainers that is part of the ECS Academy. In a process of co-creation, this group developed a blueprint for the ECS Academy (https://zenodo.org/records/10521787). In addition to supporting different training sessions, a specific effort of the ECS Academy included reaching out to early career researchers with an interest in participatory research and citizen science, and creating dedicated training for them. The training to early career researchers is done in close collaboration with the Marie Curie Alumni Association and sessions that are dedicated to citizen science are integrated into the annual conference of the association.
Within the blueprint, the top service of the academy was recognised as “Offer open educational resources in a format that is suitable for translation and adaptation to different languages. The
ECS Academy will provide a repository of training material, best practice examples, educational worksheet examples and templates in editable format. The repository will also include examples of stories and vignettes that can be used in different training settings”.
Using a moodle system and the EU-Citizen.Science platform, the ECS academy continues to provide open educational resources for the field. Resources are welcomed in any European language.
Currently, the ECS Academy is co-creating a competency framework for citizen science in Europe, building on the recently published ResearchComp (the European Framework for researchers competencies and skills). The process is expected to conclude in the autumn of 2025. Such a framework will help in organising training material and courses in a way that will help people to get familiarised with a topic, to intermediate and advanced expertise. It will also help in defining a framework for accreditation and recognition of skills and competencies of practitioners, and to provide pathways for career development.
The ECS academy was also recognised as one of the potential legacies of the ECS project, and in the coming year is expected to carry out some training that will carry with them charges, in order to pilot the processes of running the academy over the long run.
The overall aim is for the ECS Academy to continue and provide resources and training across Europe and the world, to support the adoption and use of citizen science and participatory methods across the research landscape. Although the process of developing the ECS Academy and its business plan is complex, the hope is that beyond the ECS project, the academy will become an integral part of the services that ECSA is offering its members and the wider research community.
References
Burgess, J., Harrison, C. M., & Limb, M. (1988). People, parks and the urban green: a study of popular meanings and values for open spaces in the city. Urban studies, 25(6), 455-473.
Vohland, K., Land-Zandstra, A., Ceccaroni, L., Lemmens, R., Perelló, J., Ponti, M., ... & Wagenknecht, K. (2021). The science of citizen science (p. 529). Springer Nature.
Weiner, D., Harris, T. M., & Craig, W. J. (2002). Community participation and geographic information systems. In Community participation and geographical information systems (pp. 3-16). CRC Press.
Photo credit: Simona Cerrato