Science with citizens

Citizen science (CS) encompasses a variety of ways in which society engages with science, ranging from knowledge production to policy change.

In recent decades, institutions around the world, and particularly the European Commission, have issued programmatic documents, promoted informal science education initiatives and designed participatory actions through citizen science.

Although inclusion is a central concept in citizen science, no rigorous studies have been conducted to assess the degree of inclusiveness of projects and to propose evidence-based measures for improvement.

This project will address these challenges: SCITIZEN will generate the first standardised method for measuring inclusion in citizen science projects, using sociological research techniques, and will make it publicly available.

A major original contribution will be the creation of an ""inclusion scale"" to assess the degree of inclusion of a certain project, being useful for informing ongoing and future projects and for understanding differences between systems (e.g. US and EU; local/regional/global levels; bottom-up and top-down designs).

This will be integrated into an ""online form"" (open access) allowing different stakeholders worldwide the self- assessment of projects (e.g. promoters, funders, institutions, civil associations, policy makers).

SCITIZEN will use that tool in a second phase of the action to evaluate inclusion in the European landscape of citizen science projects (past and present), and to inform the design of new projects. The inclusion scale is expected to be an additional indicator of project quality at the European level and beyond.

In the medium term, this action aims to increase public participation in science with inclusion at its core.