Educational institutions can teach students agency and active citizenship through co-designing and running citizen science activities. Design thinking tools are useful for co-designing activities where participants map concepts, find challenges, and prioritize solutions. Well-designed citizen science activities move beyond just open data collection, aiming for open knowledge building, data reuse for policymaking, and shared actions that benefit the community.

1. The guide of best
practices on open
knowledge activities
Kai Pata, Tallinn University
3.05.2022

2. What did INOS project do as CS?
12 CS organized by INOS with 420 participants (external from university
stakeholders) in all participating countries.
Knowledge building:
Knowledge Cafe,
Edugame jam
Dotmocratic worksop
Servces codesign with
elderly
Crowdsourcing data:
Sensor data collection
at Reidi Road
Data workshop:
SPINE contribution
event
Data workshop
Crowdsourcing
knowledge:
Edit-a-thon

3. Why should educational institutions
implement CS - “scientific citizenship”
• To initiate activities that contribute in building the scientific knowledge and data in a
publicly open way using digital technologies support
• To initiate different co-creation approaches with societal stakeholders and wider
audience in which a shared capacity will grow in the communities to act for challenges
• To experientially open up to the wider public how science contributes to the society
• To make knowledge reusable for the others by using the research integrity approaches
publicly
• To develop together with external stakeholders and wider public
• shared open resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest (widely
known as “commons creation”) that are developed in a participatory, bottom-up and
user-driven way.
• the empirical, technical and digital skills or the mastering of new techniques,
tools and research infrastructures, opening such tools up to the public use
• the evidence-based results and -policies
• change in mindsets regarding knowledge accessibility, open innovation, social
engagement and the HE role in society.

4. Why should educational institutions
implement citizen science projects -
“active participatory citizenship”
Active participatory citizenship concept is one that has been related
with the changes of agency of citizens in the life of their communities
in the dimensions of:
- politico-legal (social activism)
- socio-economic (entrepreneural)
- socio-cultural (learning, values, tolerance)
The different levels of agency have been described in CS projects’
development: the citizens may be asked to provide assistance in
co-creation, they may be requested to participate (Whitaker, 1980), they
may voluntarily want to participate or they themselves initiate the
co-creation (Voorberg et al. 2015).

5. How educational institutions may
plan CS activity with high level of
agency
The process of running the citizen science activity in the co-created mode
with public stakeholders should take the following phases:
Co-Planning the citizen science activity
i) Mapping concepts for defining shared understandings;
ii) Finding challenges and opportunities;
iii) Prioritizing challenges and opportunities to select the joint focus.
Co-design
iv) Ideating the design solution for the learning activity.
Co-Delivery
Co-Evaluation of impact
Dissemination, exploitation of results and sustainability

6. Engagement models for citizen
science projects: “agency for active
citizenship”
To move agency and responsibility to students as future
activie citizens - they learn how to initiate CS activities
Shirk et al. (2012) distinguished five models in participatory public
science projects:
i) Contractual projects
ii) Contributory projects
iii) Collaborative projects
iv) Co-Created projects
v) Collegial contributions
Co-creation and co-design concepts from the citizen engagement
point of view are inclusion of non-traditional stakeholders, access
with technologies to the process, transparency, innovation,
public value creation and public value management, and
effectiveness of the process (McBride et al., 2019).
The stakeholders must perceive the value the activity
provides for them (Toots et al., 2017).

7. Coplanning and assessing of CS
activity design by students

8. Planning for CS engagement -
personas

9. Planning for CS engagement -
win-win model among CS personas

10. Planning for CS engagement -
persona journey in CS

11. What engagement models were
used for designing INOS CS cases?
• It was not familiar for the educators to create within their higher
education courses tasks where they give partial or full responsibility
for the students to plan their learning outcomes and plan their own
learning activities as open knowledge building with external
stakeholders.
• In several explored cases the students and academic staff collaborated
intensely during the design/planning phase (Noise pollution, Catch up
Let!, Rover adventure, Life in Farms).
• The success of such cases where responsibility for planning learning
outcomes and activities is shared with students indicates that it could
be a fertile ground for higher education activities to create more
self-direction intent and agency among students. Such cases enable
self-organization as well as agency growth among students.
• In many cases, the initial learning task designers experimented in
shifting the agency to different target groups.The mentoring and
facilitator’s role-modelling was crucial in this. For example, the agency of
elderly stakeholders was grown in teamwork where mentors shaped the
creative codesign practices in teams (Elderly codesign of services).
Students' high agency in discussion was considered to shift the activity in
the run towards discussion groups (Knowledge building jams).

12. Crowdsourcing
activity at Reidi
Road
Open Knowledge activity
Access of participants: Activity was
blended with HE training course for
in-service teachers
•25 inservice teachers, 1 mentor
Planning – Initial OKA solution was
planned by educators, the usage for data
was not refined
Co-designing – Refining the OKA solution
with iterations with participants
•Using the learning design approach of INOS
•OKA survey from INOS (11 persons)
•Not using the data
•Co-implementing –
scaling it up in school 25 students with the
method

13. Engagement of people in CS
projects
Rotman et al. (2012) developed the process model of volunteers and scientists’ involvement in citizen science projects

14. How to engage better in CS
Price and Lee (2013):
• Use a Context Where Volunteers’ Contribution Is Necessary and
Meaningful for Their Scientific Inquiry. -> in SPINE
• Provide Internet Resources to Help Volunteers Interact with Peers
and Scientists. -> in all INOS activities
• Actively Involve Scientists in a Role of Teaching and
Communication. -> in Knowledge cafe’s
• Support Participants for Analyzing and Presenting Their Own
Data. -> in Data workshop and Values’ design workshop
• Encourage Participants to Become an Active Member of a
Research Community.-> in SPINE

15. How to engage better in CS
Newman et al. (2016):
Explicitly incorporate ‘place’ into project design and implementation.
-> In Crowdsourcing for sensors’ data and Cultural data activity in Old
Town
Consider ‘place’ in project and platform design, especially related to
data. -> in Crowdsourcing for sensors’ data and Cultural data activity in
Old Town, Life in Farms
Increase place-based collaboration in citizen science, enable to give
back to the community. ->in Data workshop,

16. What were outcomes of citizen
science activities: open data
Open data: the data that have been collected, digitalized, enriched,
validated or interliked in croudsourced ways as part of open science
activities and made available for public interests.
Public reuse of data in knowledge-building:
• creating dynamic services that visualise data or use it for nudging the
people, (Data workshop, Values workshop)
• cross-using the data across open science projects,
• using data for decision making or as the justification in debats etc.
(Dotmocracy workshop)
• Open data may be used also for personal purposes, such as individual
study, justified decision-making, enaction, art-making or for cultural
and gamified interaction.

17. What were outcomes of citizen
science activities: open knowledge
Open knowledge in citizen science projects is:
• a collectively developed resource in open knowledge building activities (Edit-a-thon)
• a shared or crowd knowledge that is shared, digitalized, interrelated, enriched, corrected
or remixed by public crowdsoucing effort (Cultural data in old town)
• knowledge embodied in artefacts, in social practices, or in research outputs (Cultural data
in old town)
• useful for its creators and beyond for the communities and other interested counterparts
(Values’ worksop, Elderly service design)
• made available for public use in the public debats, digital heritage repositories, research
repositories or other publicly accesible portals or sites (Cultural data in old town)
• is freely circulated – without any legal, technological or social restriction
Examples of open knowledge are: shared understanding, awareness or common ground about
something developed among participants in the discussion; a locative map for accessing digital
heritage content, the automatically digitalized and corrected by people old newspapers; collectively
gathered and edited, interlinked, remixed texts such as wikipedia resources.

18. Canvas for designing open
data/knowledge in CS

19. What did the participants like and
dislike?
I got very inspired in
how to use data.
Instead of just finding
data to use, it's been
really interesting to
create it, and have to
consider every aspect
of the data along the
way.
I greatly appreciated
the trust placed in us
by the
teacher-researchers.
unpredictability in the
activities
the challenge in the task was
perceived difficult to perform in
the beginning
readability of the data
processes

20. What did the participants gain?

21. What did the participants gain?
Missing step
from CS data
collection to
data driven
policy making
Active
partaking for
community
sake with CS

22. Takeouts
Educational institutions can teach agency of students
and citizens through codesigning and running Citizen
science activities
Design thinking tools are useful in codesigning citizen
science activities
Citizen science activities should not grab the lower
fruits of open data collection only but aim for open
knowledge building and reusing the CS for
policimaking and shared actions for their community
sake