ACTION

Description

The ACTION (Participatory science toolkit against pollution) project was co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 framework, SwafS programme. It supported, via open calls and an acceleration programme 10 new citizen science pilots, that added up to the 6 already active as part of the ACTION consortium. In addition to this, and thanks to the support of the supported pilots, ACTION team co-designed the Participatory Science Toolkit against pollution that include guidelines, tools, base studies and other useful resources for making citizen science more open, inclusive and sustainable. Finally, ACTION conducted 5 policy masterclasses that delivered national and overarching policy recommendations.

Aim

• Set up a citizen science accelerator to support hands-on citizen science activities to combat and prevent major forms of pollution;
• Carry out an open call to select 10 additional pilots with interesting, impactful ideas that address pressing pollution challenges;
• Co-design and co-develop methodologies, tools and guidelines to understand the requirements of different stakeholder groups in the citizen science lifecycle, and to open the entire scientific process to new demographic groups and communities;
• Create a digital infrastructure to help citizen scientists easily set up and manage projects in all their online and offline manifestations, manage and share their data openly, and comply with RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) practices;
• Create a sociotechnical toolkit that solves challenges around methodological decisions, task design, quality and validation, building and nurturing a community, incentivising participation, impact, and sustainability.
• Devise methods and models to assess the sustainability and impact of citizen science projects and to analyse costs and benefits from a societal, democratic, economic, scientific and environmental point of view.
• Partner with researchers, policy makers, community groups, open data and open science stakeholders and third-sector organisations to establish a multi-stakeholder ecosystem for responsible citizen science and innovation and promote ACTION and our pilots in this ecosystem to receive valuable feedback and have broad impact.

All these objectives have been achived. Have a look at our results.

How to participate

Equipment