The Citizen Cyberlab is an EU project that builds platforms, tools and pilot projects to support citizen science. It involves seven partners developing three platforms, four pilot projects and three tools to enable volunteers to participate in scientific research through tasks such as data collection and analysis. The goal is to study and foster creativity and learning in citizen science.

1. Citizen Science is the crowd-sourced
involvement of volunteers in scientific
research, who perform tasks such as
observation, data collection, measurement,
identification, pattern recognition or
computation.
At the Citizen Cyberlab, we are building Platforms, Pilot Projects and Open Source
Tools to support creativity and learning in Citizen Science.
The Citizen Cyberlab is an EU ICT project funded under the 7th Framework
Programme to study and foster creativity and learning in Citizen Science.
The Consortium Team consists of seven partners: the European Organization for
Nuclear Research (CERN), the United Nations Institute for Training and Research
(UNITAR/UNOSAT), Imperial College (ICSTM), University College London (UCL),
Université de Genève (UNIGE), Université Paris Descartes (UPD), and The Mobile
Collective (TMC).
Science for all
& all for Science
Digital Tools and Web-based Platforms for Citizen Science
The CCL Platforms
1. CitizenGrid: a platform for
volunteer computing projects being
developed by Imperial College.
2. Scientific Discovery Games: a
platform for creating games for
scientific discovery being developed
by University Paris Descartes.
3. Platform for Collaborative
Problem Solving: a platform for
collaborative problem solving being
developed by University College
London.
The CCL Pilot Projects
1. A particle physics game based
on the Test4Theory project being
developed by CERN.
2. A collaborative disaster
mapping project being developed
by UNITAR.
3. Hands-on Crowdsourcing in
Synthetic Biology being developed
by the University of Paris Descartes.
4. Community Learning through
Extreme Citizen Science being
developed by University College
London.
The CCL Tools
1. Creativity Incubator: a
community-based project incubator
for Citizen Science being developed
by University Paris Descartes
2. Device-independent
Environment for Data
Acquisition and Understanding:
an html5- based stack of tools for
mobile data collection & analysis
being developed by Imperial College
London
3. Tools for Monitoring
Community Learning, being
developed by the University of
Geneva.

2. The CitizenGrid Platform
CitizenGrid provides a web-based
interface for publishing and
running volunteer computing and
Citizen Science applications. It allows
application developers to publish
distributed computing applications
directly to the Citizen Science
community which can then be
incorporated in Citizen Science
projects by application providers or
run directly by Citizen Science
volunteers.
Users will be able to choose
between a variety of scenarios,
ranging from making their own local
compute power available to run
applications, to utilizing cloud
computing resources to run
applications, or creating a mixed
runtime environment. Launching a
client application image is carried out
from within the CitizenGrid
environment. At present,
CitizenGrid focuses on running
volunteer application clients but later
info@citizencyberlab.eu
in the development process, it will
also allow application providers to
run their server-side application
services on cloud resources.
Our platform is the Web. And
it’s powered by the Cloud.
At the Citizen Cyberlab, we are
passionate about open science. For
us, Citizen Science means open
science. And open science means
open collaboration.
Public cloud computing is a
powerful tool for collaborative open
science. With it, scientists can
collaborate in collecting and
analysing data across institutional
barriers and disciplines. And they
can do it at substantially lower cost.
At the Citizen Cyberlab, we
develop with the cloud in mind. We
try to ensure that all of our platforms
and tools are web-based, cloud-enabled,
and public.
With cloud resources, citizen
scientists can push forward the
frontier of open science. They can
create their own projects. They can
find participants. And they can make
a difference in their own
communities, as many citizen
scientists have already done using
the ExCites and Epicollect platforms.
NEXT
EVENTS
Nov 29 - Dec 4 Dec 13 - 15 Feb 20 - 22
Knownodes ‘Sustainathon’
Hack Day
Performing Arts Forum, St
Erme, France
knownodes.com
CitizenCyberlab
CitizenCyberlab.eu
Citizens of Science
Citizen Cyberscience
The Citizen Cyberlab
iGam4er - International
Game Competition for
Education & Research
Cite des Sciences, Paris
igam4er.org
The 3rd Citizen
Cyberscience Summit
Royal Geographic
Society & UCL, London
cybersciencesummit.org
Evaluating Creativity and Learning in Citizen Science.
At the Citizen Cyberlab, we want to understand how Citizen Science fosters
creativity and learning.
Thousands of volunteers will be actively participating in real research,
using the CCL platforms, tools and pilot projects. As a result, there is a great
opportunity to study creative learning on a large scale. Experts in educational
technology and human-computer interaction at University of Geneva and UCL
will be evaluating these to produce new understanding of creative learning
behaviours, anchored in real-world examples of Citizen Cyberscience.
We also want to learn from existing Citizen Science projects and tools, and
are evaluating leading examples in order to understand how they foster and
support learning. Our goal is to establish best practice in these areas, and to
create sustainable methods for measuring creativity and learning for any
citizen project.