Citizen Cyberscience Summit – Day 3

After a day of ‘listening, and a day of ‘talking, the final day of the citizen cyberscience summit brought ‘doing‘ to the summit. Although the art installation on the second day of the summit would clearly fall into the ‘doing’ category, participation in the installation was mostly in the ‘contributory’ form: after summit participants handed over the citizen (cyber)science objects, the decisions on how to use them in the installation were left to the artist, Leni Diner Dothan.

CCS14HackDayThe day started with setting up desks for each of the hackday challenges. The challenges ranged from Synthetic Biology to Citizen Science & Big Data. While those interested in assisting the challenge proposers to develop their ideas set to work, a set of shorter talks and discussions continued – including a set of impromptu 5 minute talks in an unconference session. Despite the compactness of the session, it was clear that people are responding to themes that appeared in the two previous days of the summit. For example,  Jeff Parsons addressed the common ‘how good is the data from citizen science?‘ question, which made an appearance in several talks. Jeff pointed to his Nature paper that ‘easier citizen science is better‘. Francois Grey started the conversation which he is developing with Creative Commons and Open Knowledge Foundation about the relationships between Open Science and Citizen Science, asking if there should be an ‘Open Citizen Science’.

Geographical citizen Science was at the heart of several talks that explored the links between mapping technologies, DIY sensors and citizen science. The summit benefited from the participation of several early career researchers who were funded to visit UCL as part of the COST ENERGIC scientific network. The exchange of knowledge that is not only enabled through networks, but also through the communities of practice in DIY electronics or VGI, was clearly visible. One talk discussed using Public Laboratory technologies in schools in Germany and in another talk  about using those technologies in Jerusalem. Another example of such links was demonstrated in the collaboration between Chinese and UK-based students to build a new DIY microscope.

Personally, the re-appearance of my ‘levels of participation in citizen science‘ classification is both satisfying (someone found it useful!) and fascinating, as each use of it illustrated a different interpretation and understanding of it. The levels are fuzzy and open to interpretation, so these discussions help the process of understanding what should be included in each category, and how the different levels map onto a specific project or activity.

The final talk by Jeff Howe – who coined the term crowdsourcing – discussed the way new ideas emerge from allowing a large group of people to participate in solving problems as this can open up a wider set of skills and expertise. He noted that in many cases, the success of large collaborations comes from a ‘gift’, which is creating a system or a service that provides something that people want, or which can help them to do what interests them. Or, as he phrased it, ‘ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community‘.

CCS14HackDayPrezAn example of some of the issues that Jeff covered was provided during the presentations from the hackday. As in the previous summit, we carefully measured the applause from the audience with a noise meter, to ascertain the activity that the participants in the summit liked the most. This time, it was the development of a bio-sensor that can be integrated into textiles. This challenge was led by Paula Nerlich, who is studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, showing that citizen science ideas can come from outside the traditional scientific disciplines (image by Cindy Regalado).

To get a better sense of the atmosphere, you can find plenty of interviews on the ‘Citizens of Science’ podcast board which explores the needs of the citizen science community.

Since we first began to organise the summit almost a year ago, I have had a lingering concern that the summit would not fulfill the expectations and the success of the previous one. Once the summit ended, I was more relaxed about this – I noticed many new connections being made, and new ideas discovered by participants. Now it is time to sit back and watch what will come out of these!