This event addresses the emerging form of co-creation between researchers and communities known as citizen science. As a compelling form of engagement and inclusivity for societal change, citizen science has emerged as a powerful tool for engaging communities in scientific research, yet its potential in the Arctic region has yet to be fully explored. This one-day workshop will showcase existing work within Northern communities, bringing together several speakers to explore the opportunities and challenges of citizen science in Northern contexts. This will serve as a basis for deepening connections between the work of different colleagues doing citizen science research across the Nordic countries and Europe. Topics include local perspectives on citizen science; best practices from ongoing projects; the use of new technologies in data collection and analysis; and the role of citizen science in addressing the particular environmental challenges of the Arctic region. The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for researchers, students, practitioners, and community members to share their experiences and insights and to network with others working in this exciting field. The event is funded by the ENVIROCEN project (Nordic Council of Ministers) and the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme (Academy of Finland).
Citizen science in the dialogue between science and society
Citizen science has the potential to bring together science, policy makers, and society as a whole in an impactful way. In this process, communication is key. But what do we mean by “communication”? In this webinar we will explore how dialogical and participatory communication, where all parties are actively involved, is strategic both for research and for society. We will take a journey through science in recent decades to grasp its rapid and incredible transformations and understand how science communication has welcomed and interpreted them. And we will see how citizen science can be a truly revolutionary approach to democratise science and make it truly inclusive and open to diversity. Should you have any questions about the event, please contact us at time4cs@apre.it or at time4cs@crowdhelix.com.
University of Warsaw Library, …
#TranskriBUWmaraton is an event from 3 to 30 April 2023 as part of the Citizen Science Month celebrations. All interested readers and supporters of University of Warsaw Library will have the opportunity to cooperate in discovering, reading and transcribing historical handwritten documents, within a dedicated group on the FB profile of the University of Warsaw Library. This time we invited our colleagues from faculty libraries to cooperate. Especially for this occasion they chose interesting, rare and often surprising materials. Among them there are marginalia of one of the most eccentric Polish artists, handwritten maps, certificates labeling unique geological specimens and descriptions of plants from the so-called Hundred-year-old Herbarium. Together, we will try to unravel one of the unexplained mysteries of the Second World War, hidden in an encrypted and unread document from the collection of the Manuscripts Department of the University of Warsaw Library. And this is just a small part of what awaits you this year! We invite the entire academic community and all interested parties - both amateurs and specialists in their fields - to help in making historical sources more accessible and useful. As part of the project, for four weeks in April, we will be posting scans of selected handwritten documents on the TranskriBUW Facebook group. The task consist in reading and rewriting the text of the documents as precisely as possible and publishing the prepared transcripts in the comments section. The correctness of all prepared transcripts will be verified by University of Warsaw Library employees, who will further decide to link them to the scans of manuscripts placed in the Crispa. Digital Library of the University of Warsaw (https://crispa.uw.edu.pl/). Transcriptions will improve the readability as well as facilitate search and access to these handwritten documents. Everyone will be able to use them freely. The language of the event is Polish.
CitSciHelvetia is the Swiss Citizen Science Conference. CitSciHelvetia connects Swiss stakeholders in Citizen Science and participatory research in general, promoting the exchange of experiences and shared learning between the three language and cultural regions. It serves as the platform for professional exchange with Science et Cité hosting the second Swiss Citizen Science Conference. CitSciHelvetia'23 will take place on March 29 and 30, 2023 at Landhaus Solothurn. It follows the motto “Citizen Science – Making impact participatory!”. The conference addresses project leaders and project staff of Citizen Science projects, representatives of universities, research institutions, NGOs and associations as well as people who engage themselves in Citizen Science on an institutional level. In addition, the conference addresses representatives of science communication, transdisciplinary and participatory research, and Open Science. Registration for the Swiss Citizen Science Conference is open until March 8, 2023.
ECS Satellite event on Science Communication
The 2023 Annual Conference of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) will be held in Cordoba (Spain) on 24-25 February 2023. The day before the Conference - 23 February 2023 - a Science Communication Training Workshop will be held as a satellite event, organised by the European Citizen Science (ECS) project in collaboration with the MCAA Communication Working Group. The overall objective of the European Citizen Science (ECS) project is to enlarge, empower and strengthen the European Citizen Science community through training, capacity building and awareness raising activities which encompass the whole range of needs and challenges. As a member of the project consortium, the MCAA is taking part in several work packages and tasks. More specifically, through the ECS project, the MCAA will support the co-creation of the European Citizen Science Academy by designing training for educators, trainers, and researchers. As part of the ECS project, the MCAA is organising the training workshop “Science Communication: How to create a successful research blog.” Blogging is a powerful and effective way to communicate research to a wider audience and engage citizen into the science endeavour. Within the general framework of citizen science, in this workshop participants will learn the ins and outs of what it takes to explain their research in a popular science blog that can be understood by anyone. The one-day full-immersion workshop will be highly interactive and aims to teach by doing. It will also be an introductory course into science communication for researchers with and without prior experience. During the training workshop, participants will: - have an overview of citizen science and the ECS project - learn how science communication can positively impact society as well as a researcher’s career - write a short popular science blog that can be published after the workshop - learn to adjust the text to the communication goals and audience - learn how to reduce the scientific complexity and make scientific insights accessible and interesting The training will be guided by Science Matters, a leading European science communication agency led by scientists, with extensive experience in supporting universities, companies, media, and museums. The training workshop is open to both MCAA members and non-MCAA members. In order to make it as interactive as possible and provide personalised feedback, the workshop is limited to only 30 participants. The deadline for registration is 30 January 2023, 23:00 CET. Selection of participants will be done on a rolling basis, until all 30 seats are filled. Thanks to the support of the ECS project, participants will be able to attend the workshop paying a fee of 150 Euro, which corresponds to a 50% discount on the full price.
Recommendations for policy-makers arising from CS Track investigations into Citizen Science
The main mission of the CS Track project has been to observe and analyse the phenomena of citizen science using empirical and theoretical studies. Based on these studies, the team have constructed a set of policy recommendations. Further specific policy recommendations have also been prepared with the stated purpose of directing attention to questions related to Citizen Science that need attention. During this webinar the team will present the recommendations that they have prepared arising from the CS Track project and will discuss their impact on Citizen Science policy from different perspectives. Join us to find out more about these recommendations, how were they created, and what kind of future for Citizen Science do they direct us towards? Seminar leader: Ohto Sabel, University of Jyväskylä
After three exciting and intense years, CoAct is coming to an end. Citizen Social Sciences intends to collaborate equally between citizen groups and academic actors. As a consortium, we propose a new understanding of Citizen Social Science as participatory research co-designed and driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern. They become co-researchers in processes commonly dominated by academic researchers. Throughout the last three years, we brought together and further developed methods to give citizen groups an equal ‘seat at the table’ through active participation in research, from the design to the interpretation of the results and their transformation into concrete actions. But we also enabled intensive discussions and knowledge sharing regarding the framing of participation and the predominant understanding of science. All these activities generated experiences and lessons learned, which we wish to share and discuss with everyone interested in our Final Event Week. We are organising three days of knowledge sharing, reflecting, and discussing the future of CSS based on these learnings.
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!
The role of photographic heritage in empowering communities participation in cultural heritage
This event is organized by Photoconsortium in cooperation with the University of Pisa and will be hosted at the Museum of Graphics in Pisa (Italy). The event will take the form of a 1-day conference with leading speakers from the CitizenHeritage consortium partners and other experts in digital cultural heritage, in Social Sciences and Humanities research and in the use of participatory approaches in a cultural and/or educational context. The main aim of the event will be to offer insights about successful stories of citizen participation in Cultural Heritage Institutions and Higher Education Institutions. In addition to the conference programme, a digitization desk will be organized, inviting participants to share heritage photos from their family albums, which will be digitized on the spot by a professional photographer. The stories associated with the image(s) will be collected and converted in appropriate metadata to accompany the digital objects. The collected records will be aggregated by Photoconsortium and offered to Europeana for publication.
Cos4Cloud and its services for the citizen science community
Cos4Cloud is a EU-funded project that is co-designing, prototyping and implementing a number of new tools and services that address the technological challenges shared by citizen observatories. These services can help citizen observatories to improve data and information quality of observations and can be used as modules, so that any existing citizen science observatory will be able to choose and install the technological services they wish. In this webinar, we will give a short introduction of the project and present two of the services developed: MOBIS and FASTCAT-Cloud. MOBIS is a service to create integrative citizen science apps where you can report all your environmental and biodiversity observations in one Android or iOS app. FASTCAT (Flexible Ai System for CAmera Traps)-Cloud is an open website service that allows you to automatically filter out most unwanted pictures and video streams, keeping images of animals, and to integrate machine learning technology, among other things. The presentations will be followed by a Q&A with speakers. The webinar will last one hour. After closing the webinar we will keep the Zoom channel open for participants to ask further questions and make suggestions about how Cos4Cloud can benefit their citizen science project(s).
Social media and online platforms are used by citizen science projects to share information about their work, how to participate, and motivate citizens to join them but also as a research tool. CS Track is exploring how communication is done and what type of information is shared. In this workshop, we want to share our insights on this and also explain how this data can be used in other contexts such as formal education. Furthermore, we would like to know more about your experience with metadata, metadata standards, and your ideas on how this data can also be used for other purposes. Who is it aimed at? Project initiators and coordinators, CS platform managers What will you learn? How information about citizen science is shared online, the importance of metadata standards, and the uses of this data in educational settings. Workshop leaders Workshop leaders: Miriam Calvera-Isabal and Dr. Patricia Santos, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Reaching out and stepping up: How citizen science and RRI can enhance bioscience research
Since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic, the impact of bioscience research on all of our lives has been made far too clear. However, developments within this field of research will continue to have long-lasting impacts on the world around us long after the current pandemic, from improving food security, mitigating climate change, protecting wildlife and the environment, as well as to continued medical advancements of all types. As the world continues to collide with the field of bioscience research, it has become increasingly important to include societal actors when we approach these fields of study. ResBios and StepChange invite you to join an online conversation about how RRI and citizen science can be used to enhance research, with a particular focus on open science and public engagement in the fields of bioscience research. By combining our shared experiences, we aim to demonstrate the theory and practice of employing these principles while discussing future challenges.