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Cal academy convenings presentation rc
- 1. Title
- 4. Citizen Science Members of the public engaging in authentic scientific investigations: asking questions, collecting data, and/or interpreting results.
- 5. WHY?? … science … social- ecological Participation systems Flickr photo, sierraclub … individuals
- 6. Degree of participation Contributory Collaborative Co-Created Define a question/issue Gather information Develop explanations Design data collection methods Collect samples Analyze samples Analyze data Interpret data/conclude Disseminate conclusions Discuss results/inquire further Bonney et al. 2009. CAISE Inquiry Group Report.
- 7. Participation degree – who participates, and in what? extent of public involvement in the research process quality – whose interests are being served, and to what end? how interests are balanced in a project’s design
- 11. Contributory Collaborative Co-Created Outcomes for: Science + ≈ Social- ecological systems ≈ + Individuals ≈ + Shirk et al. in press, Ecology and Society
- 12. Numbers of participants reached Collaborations between large-scale projects and local educators? Depth of participant engagement and learning
- 13. Learning as participation in activity
- 15. Curators Observers Creators Critiquers Documenters Data Manipulators? Story-tellers
- 16. Project design to allow fluidity: •Access to data •Access to other participants •Access to project leaders
- 17. Vastness of participation possibility
- 18. Timing Year-round Seasonal
- 19. User Commitment One time ---------------- Casual -------------------Protocol driven
- 22. Map- making
- 23. Picture/ Video/ Audio Collection
- 25. Evangelizing
- 28. Analysis
- 29. Discourse
- 30. Vastness of participation possibility Only limits besides imagination are: Intended outcomes & Institutional resources
Editor's Notes
- What is citizen science? Because I’m here from the Lab of Ornithology, I’ll give you this example to start. Watch the map. This science, the science of landscape-scale migration patterns, could not happen without thousands of eBird contributors across the continent. The power of citizen science is in observations.
- But the power of citizen science is also in experiences. This is Sherman’s Creek, outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where residents in the 1990’s began collecting baseline water quality data in the watershed. They already knew the resource intimately, and now they also know it scientifically.
- Why engage the public in participating in citizen science? A range of outcomes. But, projects each achieve a different range of outcomes. How can we understand the relationship between participation (ultimately, project design) and project outcomes?
- You can think about these models as one way of describing the DEGREE of participation in the research process. But, we should also be mindful of the quality of participation, which relates to how a project is designed. Whose interests are heard and considered in the design (and redesign) of a project? Whose goals and interests are heard?
- (I may not keep this slide in).
- What can this mean in practice? eBird is largely a contributory project. (add a slide here about eBird outcomes?)
- Sherman’s Creek is largely a co-created project (add a slide here about outcomes?)
- IN GENERAL, there are tradeoffs in project design, in terms of the outcomes they are well-suited to achieve. However, with careful and attentive consideration in the design (or redesign) of projects, these strengths can be enhanced and limitations addressed. (brief example)
- How do we reach the “sweet spot” for participation? How do we reach the necessary audience (for both science and learning), and do it meaningfully for both?
- As STEM organizations most of our funding is contingent on showing that our projects have the potential to reach some set of learning outcomes. We know that there is a connection between participation and learning. Most learning theory in the past ten years has examined this connection and tried to understand its mechanics. That is one reason citizen science is so attractive, at its most basic it is about participation. When people participate, they learn. We almost can’t help it. So, one of our primary goals is to find that way (or the many ways) in which we can use citizen science to get people participating.
- One way to mitigate the inherent conflict between potentially competing outcomes is to create projects that are mindfully multi-role. That is, to create projects where people can take-up the role most comfortable to them. Multiple modes of participation – built from expertise of participantsLearning as participation in activity. We know that not everyone gravitates towards the same kinds of activities. Research on online behavior is an excellent example of this. Some people contribute content, some people curate content, some people consume content, and others critique/ or review it.Bernoff and Li’s Ladder of participation summarizes findings about how people participate on the internet. There is a clear hierarchy depicted here. With “creators” at the top and inactive at the bottom. In the world of citizen science, however, I think we might need to let-go of the heirarchy in order to best work with our largest constituency. There are activities that people may be more comfortable engaging in that are not necessarily “high” on the ladder
- Emergent and fluid roles. What people startout comfortable doing is not what they might end-up wanting to do.
- Project design to allow fluidity:Access to dataAccess to other participantsAccess to project leaders
- The most exciting thing about CS – there is a vastness of participation possibility.
- Observation and Monitoring
- Classification and curation
- Mapmaking
- Picture-taking?
- Conservation labor?
- Evangelizing. On behalf of citizen science. Evangelizing about the results of citizen science
- Specimen collection
- Resource allocation – sharing down computer time? Giving money, donating equipment
- Analysis: fold-it, personal data-mining, in classroom data analysis (especially in undergraduate classrooms, or with interest groups)
- ASTC has a new public engagement with science community of practice focused on merging our understandings of the role of discourse and the techniques of citizen science. There are active NSF proposals seeking to start projects focused on this kind of creative “citizen science”
- Vastness of participation possibility:YardMap collects geospatial data, but our outcomes will never include familiarizing our participants with data anlaysis.Institutional resources are something that often sneaks up on people who are trying to support citizen science projects. For instance, FeederWatch, which supports 15,000 repeat users each data collection season spends on average 8.32 support minutes per user to keep the project running. That translates to a 1+ FTE’s a year and does not include the project leader or data analysis – its just the time it takes to connect to users, get them submitting data, and answering their questions