Co-designing the Citizen Science Global Partnership

The workshop on the Citizen Science Global Partnership (CSGP) – the workshop included people from US, Brazil, Equador, Australia, UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, as well as UNESCO. A range of interests in terms of citizen science activities – from health to ecological observations. Martin Brocklehurst summarised where we are – in the UNEA3: there was a range of representative and at the end of a session a statement made a statement about the need for citizen science and coordination at the global level. The role of this partnership is to provide a coordination point for global organisations that are linked to a different association in different parts of the world, following the UN structure. Creating consortia for a global programme with similar research; support the collection of exchange of open, interoperable, and FAIR data, and understand and track how citizen science contributes to the SDGs. Wilson Center in DC offers an institutional home. Currently, the scope of projects that were put forward in a survey includes about 7 global scope projects and many single projects in specific countries or regions that can be part of the initiative. The common themes across projects are sustainable development goals – organisations that specifically looking at them, e.g. Citizen Science Centre Zurich. There there are an offering of technological assistant. there are conversation internally and externally in the citizen science community to address the SDGs and as we go lower than big institutions globally, there is less awareness, we need to consider a 13 years process and increase strength at a global scale and propose for creating a working group on the topic. Some of the challenges for the partnership is establishing a governance structure to think how to address requests and approaches, and that might be organised with individual volunteering to put an effort in the partnership but having some agreed ToR with their association. There are opportunities with the Geneva effort on Open17 which already have linked with UN, WHO and others. There is a website citizenscienceglobal.org – there will be a discussion forum that will require moderation and probably need to allow for closed conversations about it.

Another challenge is the aims of coordination of communication – to UN, businesses etc. Need to help to establish new networks in new places. The participants in the meeting concluded that the top priority is network and lead consortia for global projects. Future meetings might coincide with international conferences that are linked to UN and the global data forum.