No project is an island|Bridges towards a joint legacy for the future of citizen science in Europe
Citizen science thrives on collaboration between researchers, policymakers, innovators, and the public. Yet within the citizen science community itself, a critical question remains: do we have the infrastructure to enable effective, lasting knowledge exchange across initiatives and projects? No project operates in isolation, and the collective learning generated across the field represents an underutilised asset for science and policymaking alike. At a time when public engagement is increasingly recognised as essential to rebuilding trust in institutions and tackling mis- and disinformation, the connections we build within the citizen science ecosystem matter more than ever. Sharing what works and what doesn't strengthens the community's capacity to deliver the scientific, environmental, and societal benefits that make citizen science a genuine return on investment for Europe. This summer, both the ECS and IMPETUS projects reach their conclusion. Before they do, we want to invite the citizen science community to come together to reflect on how these projects have supported citizen science across Europe and to celebrate the real-world impacts this work has made possible. The event will also provide an opportunity to hear from new and established citizen science projects, alongside stakeholders and decision-makers, ensuring that the momentum built can be sustained and that science continues to serve the society it represents. Building on the Citizen Science Archipelago series from the ECS project, this gathering reaffirms a founding principle of the citizen science community: no project is an island. Mutual exchange is not simply a nice-to-have; it is the foundation on which the continued growth and impact of citizen science depends.
Do you want to help build the European Research Infrastructure for Excellence in Citizen Science? The first step is happening in the upcoming ECS Collaboration Session! The RIECS-Concept project will conceptualise the European Research Infrastructure for Excellence in Citizen Science. This RI will integrate citizens’ resources, such as mobile phones and computers, with existing scientific platforms and data collections; and it will offer transversal services, improving accessibility across research communities. The RIECS-Concept project will produce two key outcomes: a conceptual design including a feasibility study, and a five-year implementation plan for the new research infrastructure. These outcomes will provide detailed insights into the diversity and maturity of the concept considering technical, operational, societal, and environmental challenges associated with establishing the permanent and shared infrastructure. This is the very first activity of many to gather inputs and community-based evidence, in collaboration with the ECS project. You will have a chance to not only learn about this important project but also to bring your own input, needs and solutions, independently of your background or scientific domains. Who can join? This Collaboration Session is aimed at the entire Citizen Science community: practitioners, students, researchers, educators, representatives of CS projects and networks, etc.
IMPETUS Open Call For Citizen Science Projects
Empowering Citizen Science: IMPETUS Launches its Final Open Call for Innovative Projects The IMPETUS project seeks innovative and impactful projects that harness the power of citizen science to address critical societal challenges. Two Exciting Opportunities in this Open Call: -European Union Prize for Citizen Science -IMPETUS Citizen Science Accelerator Programme This open call runs from January 7th to March 10th, 2025 (23:59 CET) for the European Union Prize for Citizen Science and until March 13th, 2025 (23:59 CET) for the IMPETUS Accelerator Programme. European Union Prize for Citizen Science: IMPETUS wants to put outstanding citizen science front and centre with the European Union Prize for Citizen Science. IMPETUS celebrates the success and diversity of Citizen Science across Europe and ensures that this fantastic work gets the recognition it deserves. The European Union Prize for Citizen Science consists of three main awards. A Grand Prize of 60,000€ and two additional prizes for projects that best demonstrate how citizen science can be used to promote Diversity and Collaboration, and Digital Communities, each will be awarded 20,000€. But we also know that there is so much excellent citizen science happening in Europe right now, so IMPETUS will give honorary mentions to 27 additional projects, who will have their work showcased alongside the winners of the three prizes at the 2025 Ars Electronica Science and Technology Festival, on September 3-7, 2025 Linz, Austria. IMPETUS Accelerator: do you have an idea for a citizen science project or are coordinating an initiative that focuses on: Citizen Science to Promote Circular Communities. -Resource Management. -Infrastructure and Housing. -Disaster Resilience. Citizen Science for a Fair and Just Society. -Democracy and Peace -Inclusion -Public Trust and Empowerment. If your project could benefit from funding, mentorship, and training to take your work to the next level. Then, the IMPETUS Accelerator programme could be for you. To learn more about the Open Call, head over to the IMPETUS website or join us at one of our explainer webinars on the 22nd of January (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/impetus-open-call-2025-webinar-1-tickets-1145437537509?aff=oddtdtcreator) or the 19th of February at 10:00 CET to have all your questions answered. The IMPETUS project aims to promote citizen science at all levels and to help these projects achieve their impressive goals. Head over to the IMPETUS website to learn more- https://impetus4cs.eu/opencall/.
University of Warwick, Scarman …
Collaborations Workshop 2024 (CW24) will bring together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, policy makers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. CW24 will take place as a hybrid event from Tuesday 30 April to Thursday 2 May 2024, at the University of Warwick, UK. Registration is open via Eventbrite until Friday 5 April 2024. The full agenda can be found here. The themes of CW24 will be: Environmental Sustainability AI/ML tools for science Citizen science Each topic will be the subject of a keynote talk: Keynote 1: AI/ML Tools | Arfon Smith is a product manager at GitHub and works on integrating AI into the core GitHub experience. He also works on bringing open source to academia by improving support for scholarly work on the platform. Keynote 2: Citizen Science | Lucy Robinson leads the Community Science Programme at the Natural History Museum, London, and is an internationally recognised citizen science specialist with 15 years of experience. Keynote 3: Environmental Sustainability | Dr Kelly Widdicks is a Software Systems Architect at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and leads research on the responsible co-design of digital research infrastructure for environmental science. Further information about the keynote speakers can be found here.
Let’s discuss data and the eu-citizen.science platform with and for the citizen science community!
The ECS project invites everyone from the citizen science (CS) community to a joint event featuring the launch of the latest updates of the eu-citizen.science platform on April 24th, followed by the Cluster event on data infrastructure, services and practices on April 25th, 2024. On April 24th, from 10:00 to 12:00 CEST, we will present the eu-citizen.science platform's latest features, designed to benefit the CS community. Plus, there will be a training session to demystify the use of metadata generated by CS platforms. This session will use an interactive approach to describe and better understand the communities behind these platforms, enhancing your ability to engage with and contribute to the CS community. On April 25th, from 9:00 to 12:30 CEST, we will hold the Cluster Event on data practices, services and infrastructures in CS. The first part of the event will include presentations and Q&A sessions with key speakers in the field. The second part of the event will enable participants to discuss their needs and challenges in terms of data visualisation and analysis, qualitative data infrastructures and services as well as data ethics and policies. Key speakers are: - Michael Arentoft, Head of Unit, Open Science and Research Infrastructures, DG Research & Innovation, European Commission - Karel Luyben, President of the EOSC Association - Giovanni Maccani, Research Director, Ideas for Change - Dr. Pierre Bonnet, Botanist, CIRAD, BIOS Dept., UMR AMAP and Scientific coord. of the Pl@ntNet citizen science platform - Dr. Gefion Thuermer, Head of Research, Open Data Institute - Alessia Smaniotto, Citizen Science Officer, Operas See here the full agenda for both days: https://tinyurl.com/p3yb77w9 Register here: https://tinyurl.com/mp4yrrjx
Webinar training on VERA, the Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation, developed through the COESO project
Join our webinar training on VERA, the Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation, developed through the COESO project (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues). 📅 Date: 16 January 2024 ⏲️ Time: 11:00-12:00 CEST 🚩 Register now: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEld--rpz4qEtdUv1lf9dydbluoUKHcpYDc Participatory research/ citizen science in social sciences and humanities disciplines usually involves small-scale, intense collaborations between members of academic institutions (universities and other research institutions) and members of non-academic organizations that work directly with the community (community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations, civil associations, small businesses etc.). The VERA platform serves as a “collaboratory” where participatory research/citizen science projects can be realized and new collaborations can be established. Through its profiling and matchmaking tool, its project management features and its funding database, VERA helps projects get started, stay organized, and find the necessary funding. At this webinar, participants will get guidance on how to use VERA platform. The COESO project is a 3-year project funded until Dec 2023 by the European Commission's Science with and for Society grant and supported by the OPERAS research infrastructure.
The Open Science Conference is an annual international conference dedicated to the Open Science movement. It provides a unique forum for researchers, librarians, practitioners, infrastructure providers, policy makers, and other important stakeholders to discuss the latest and future developments in Open Science. In 2023, the conference can celebrate its 10th anniversary. The conference is hosted by the Leibniz Strategy Forum Open Science and organized under the lead of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. The conference offers insights into both practical and technical innovations that serve the implementation of open practices as well as current and pioneering developments in the global Open Science movement. Such developments are, for example, the increasing plea for open practices as lessons learned from global crises as well as recent discussions on the relation of Open Science, civic science education, and knowledge equity. Furthermore, the conference offers many opportunities for networking and exchange.
REINFORCE International Training Course 2022
Citizen Science creates numerous opportunities for all citizens – independent of their location, gender, or education – to be involved in ground-breaking fundamental research. Through citizen science activities, everyone can contribute to the development of new knowledge. Increasingly, scientists from Large Research Infrastructures and Frontier Physics experiments are starting to share their data and ask for citizens to support the optimization of their detectors to enhance discoveries potential. Have you ever wondered how you can contribute to cutting edge scientific research or how can frontier science contribute to society? Can you imagine yoruselves participating in a community with other citizens, teachers and researchers, analyzing real data, participating in exciting discoveries, and helping optimize Large Research Infrastructures in the fields of Gravitational Wave Astronomy, High Energy Physics, Neutrino Astronomy and Cosmic Rays? The REINFORCE International Training Course 2022 answers the questions above with a loud “Yes” and invites you to join a vibrant community of citizens, researchers and educators from all over the world aiming to bridge the gap between frontier research in Physics and Society through citizen science!
Europe is home of major world class research infrastructures which are crucial enablers of research and technological innovation and drivers of multidisciplinary and data-intensive science. Such research infrastructures can also play a key role in eliminating anti-intellectual beliefs in society and providing citizens with the intellectual ammunition needed to become critical consumers of scientific knowledge. This can be done by creating a well-functioning ecosystem that allows new forms of co-creation between professional researchers and citizen scientists by empowering the latter not only with access to research outputs but also to take part in the process of scientific discovery producing high-quality data and adding to the scientific knowledge. In that regard, it is of utmost important to rethink policies to make research infrastructures a key player in citizen science through a consistent involvement of citizens making a genuine and valued contribution to managing the data avalanche.
The Open Science Conference 2022 is the 9th international conference of the Leibniz Research Alliance Open Science. The annual conference is dedicated to the Open Science movement and provides a unique forum for researchers, librarians, practitioners, infrastructure providers, policy makers, and other important stakeholders to discuss the latest and future developments in Open Science. The conference offers insights into both practical and technical innovations that serve the implementation of open practices as well as current and pioneering developments in the global Open Science movement. Such developments are, for example, the increasing plea for open practices as lessons learned from global crises as well as recent discussions on the relation of Open Science and knowledge equity. Furthermore, the conference offers many opportunities for networking and exchange.
We are organising an hybrid scientific session at the Ocean Science Meeting, 27 Feb - 4 March 2022 on ‘The uptake of data by citizen scientists, aggregators and end-users: successes, challenges and gaps in the dataflow’ and are inviting you to submit an abstract by 29 September 2021. Please find more details of the session below. OD11 The uptake of data by citizen scientists, aggregators and end-users: successes, challenges and gaps in the dataflow Keywords: Citizen science, marine data, dataflow, interoperability, acceptance, engagement, policy, data management, validation, end user needs, sustainability, impact Organizers: Patrick Gorringe, patrick.gorringe@smhi.se, James Sprinks, jsprinks@earthwatch.org.uk, Peter Thijsse, peter@maris.nl, Emilie Breviere, emilie.breviere@smhi.se Citizen science is a particularly impactful channel to collect data and its utility has been proven on small scales, yet the groundbreaking, and absolutely necessary, potential of citizen science has yet to be realized. Over the last decade, marine citizen science projects have provided a cost-effective means to collect extensive data sets covering vast spatio-temporal scales where conventional data collection is limited in operation, such as coastal seas. However many initiatives fail to be sustainable, and fail to reach acceptance of their data by scientists and by policy makers. To be efficient and successful a project should provide data with sufficient quality, structure and availability to be used by professionals and ensure that citizen scientists realize and appreciate the impact of their contribution towards the understanding of the scientific big picture. When studying the flow of citizen science data, it follows a series of steps from the providers to the users, via data aggregators. The essential steps of this process are the acquisition, management, flow in key infrastructure, evaluation and impact analyses, use in ocean models, research and forecasting, and public visualization. The objective of the co-organizers is to provide a session during which participants will share experiences on successes and failures, needs and limitations in the data flow chain. The session wishes to be a unique niche for the numerous actors of the data flow in marine citizen science initiatives to meet and exchange. It will explore current and future collaborations, hear from invited experts about wider citizen science initiatives and discuss how marine data aggregators in its next phase can more systematically link with citizen science to not only expand the data provision from citizen science, but also find ways to encourage citizen science to work closer with data aggregators across the full value chain.
3rd ESFRI RIs -EOSC Workshop: What does EOSC bring to RI users?
The main objective of the workshop is to bring together ESFRI, ESFRI Research Infrastructures (RIs) and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) stakeholders, in order to showcase and better comprehend the EOSC concept, including the Open Science and “FAIR” policy agenda, and the vision for the future, along with the EOSC value proposition for its users, and ensure an optimal federation of clusters and RIs with EOSC. The event will focus on the current state of EOSC and how the thematic RIs and ESFRI clusters fit into the developing landscape, including the partnership with the newly established EOSC Association.