The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
A CRI-Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle workshop: created by Anshu (CRI long term fellow) and Simon (MNHN), from a meeting at the Galaxy community in Freiburg. I joined the design process and it was structured so the museum and the CRI present the systems that are being developed, with a scope for a discussion about lessons … Continue reading Platforms for citizen science
Continue reading »Today, I gave the opening lectures of the new UCL course ‘Introduction to Citizen Science and Scientific Crowdsourcing‘. In a way, it was more work than I originally thought, but I also thought that I’m underestimating the effort – so it’s not completely unexpected. Although I am responsible for the first installation of Moodle, the … Continue reading Launching a citizen science course – week 1
In December 2016, ECSA and the Natural History Museum in Berlin organised a workshop on analysing apps, platforms, and portals for citizen science projects. Now, the report from the workshop has evolved into an open peer review paper on RIO Journal. RIO is worth noticing: is “The Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal” and what … Continue reading Defining principles for mobile apps and platforms development in citizen science
Last December, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) awarded funding to UCL Extreme Citizen Science group and Earthwatch as part of their investment in public engagement. The projects are all short – they start from January to March and included public engagement and training to early career researchers. “Into the Night” highlights the importance of light … Continue reading Into the night – training day on citizen science slides
As part of a special issue of the open access Human Computation Journal, I am the co-author of the editorial Creativity and Learning in Citizen Cyberscience – Lessons from the Citizen Cyberlab Summit. Following the summit (see blog post here), Egle Ramanauskaite took the blog posts and edited them with her notes, which led to a … Continue reading Editorial in Human Computation Journal – Creativity and Learning in Citizen Cyberscience
As I’ve noted in the earlier post, I’ve travelled through central California in August, from San Francisco, to Los Angeles. Reading ‘Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction‘, made me think about citizen science, but this was my holiday – and for the past 4 years, as I finish setting the email away … Continue reading Opportunistic Citizen Science in central California
At the beginning of the year, I received an email from Mary Ellen Hannibal, asking for a clarification of the ‘extreme citizen science’ concept. Later on, Mary Ellen provided me with an early copy of ‘Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction‘, and asked if I will be willing to recommend … Continue reading Reading ‘Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction’ in place
[rough version – will be clean up soon!] Introduction and review of day 2 Muki Haklay University College London, UK Co-designing research projects: Citizen science meets stakeholder involvement Heribert Hofer IZW Berlin, Germany – Exploring stakeholders in citizen science, examples of co-design projects in ecology/conservation science. Looking at impacts on attitudes and behaviours of stakeholders. … Continue reading ECSA2016: Open Citizen Science – Day 3
[rough draft – will be corrected and updated later] The afternoon started with citizen science studies – with short talks and interactive session that was about Citizen Science Studies – Engaging with the participatory turn in the co-production of science and society Elevator talks & interactive session organised by Dana Mahr University of Geneva, CH; Anett Richter … Continue reading ECSA 2016: Open Citizen Science – Day 2 (Afternoon)
‘Citizen Science as Participatory Science‘ is one of the most popular posts that I have published here. The post is the core section of a chapter that was published in 2013 (the post itself was written in 2011). For the first European Citizen Science Association conference I was asked to give a keynote on the second … Continue reading Participatory [Citizen] Science
[I’m publishing it full of typos closer to live blogging – come back in a day to see a nice version ] The 19th May 2016 was a special day for the European Citizen Science Association, with the opening of the first conference of the organisation, focusing on the links between citizen science and open … Continue reading ECSA 2016: Open Science – Policy Innovation & Social Impact (Day 1 morning)
Thanks to an invitation from John Hammersley of OverLeaf I gave a talk at #FuturePub 7 event, which was dedicated to “New Developments in Scientific Collaboration Tech”. The evening was structured around 7 very short talks (about 5 minutes) so my slides are a very short introduction to citizen science (in this event, I would say that … Continue reading #FuturePub – Citizen Science, Open Science & scientific publications
Every project ends, eventually. The Citizen Cyberlab project was funded through the seventh framework programme of the European Union (or EU FP7 in short), and run from September 2012 to November 2015. Today marks the final review of the project in with all the project’s partners presenting the work that they’ve done during the project. The project had … Continue reading Citizen Cyberlab – notes from final review (26-27 January, Geneva)
Following a short project that was headed by Daniel Wyler of the University of Zürich in collaboration with the League of European Research Universities, two draft documents aimed at universities and research funders were developed. The documents can be found here, and there is scope to comments and suggest changes for the next month on … Continue reading Standards and Recommendations for Citizen Science (University of Zurich)
The slides below are from a talk that I gave today at UCL Institute for Global Prosperity The abstract for the talk is: With a growing emphasis on civil society-led change in diverse disciplines, from International Development to Town Planning, there is an increasing demand to understand how institutions might work with the public effectively … Continue reading UCL Institute for Global Prosperity Talk: Extreme Citizen Science – Current Developments
Following the ECSA meeting, the Data & tools working group workshop was dedicated to progressing the agenda on data & infrastructure. Jaume Piera (chair, Data and Tools working group of ECSA) covered the area of citizen science data – moving from ideas, to particular solutions, to global proposals – from separate platforms (iNaturalist, iSpot, GBIF, … Continue reading Citizen Science Data & Service Infrastructure
The second day of the Citizen Cyberlab Summit followed the same pattern of the first day: Two half day sessions, in each one short presentations from guest speakers from outside the project consortium, followed by two demonstrations of specific platform, tool, pilot or learning, and ending with discussion in groups, which were then shared back. The first … Continue reading Citizen Cyberlab Summit (day 2)
The Citizen Cyberlab Summit is the final event of the Citizen Cyberlab project. The name might sound grand, but the event itself was fairly intimate and focused, with about 40 participants from across the world. The aim of the event was to share the learning from the project and compare them to similar activities around the world. It … Continue reading Citizen Cyberlab Summit (day 1)
The journal Nature published today an editorial on citizen science, titled ‘Rise of the citizen scientist’. It is very good editorial that addresses, head-on, some of the concerns that are raised about citizen science, but it is also have a problematic ending. On the positive side, the editorial recognises that citizen scientists can do more than just data … Continue reading ‘Nature’ Editorial on Citizen Science
The Data and the City workshop will run on the 31st August and 1st September 2015, in Maynooth University, Ireland. It is part of the Programmable City project, led by Prof Rob Kitchin. My contribution to the workshop is titled Beyond quantification: a role for citizen science and community science in a smart city and is extending a short article from … Continue reading Beyond quantification: a role for citizen science and community science in a smart city
NighStcience 2015 in CRI-Paris, 10-11 July – Night Science is a mode of exploratory, innovative science, and as in previous years, it is an event that mixes talks with active hands-on experience. The event this year was marked by linking open innovation, social responsibility and entrepreneurship to science. The event was opened by as Francois … Continue reading NightScience 2015 – CRI Paris
On the last day of ECSITE 2015, the first session on the Future of Citizen Science focused on exploring citizen science with reference to Socientize White Paper on Citizen Science. Paulo Gama Mota started by covering the Socientize project. The project created a platform for citizen science projects, with the science museum of Coimbra providing … Continue reading ECSITE 2015 – Citizen Science & Participatory Practices
In the UK, every 5 years or so, there is a complex and expensive process that evaluates the work of academics in research institutions across the country, and rate them in terms of quality (see the infographics). The last round of this process was called ‘Research Evaluation Framework’ or REF for short. You don’t need … Continue reading Citizen Science in the Research Evaluation Framework impact studies
Originally posted on The GeographiGal:
It’s now a week since my viva, which flouted all my expectations in every possible way. I could not have prepared myself for so many of the questions I was asked or being so lost for words. I will forever be grateful to my examiners for reading my thesis and their suggestions/corrections;…
This post is about perceptions, engagement and the important of ‘participant-observation‘ approach in citizen science research. It start with a perception about volunteer computing. The act of participating in scientific project by downloading and installing software that will utilise unused processing cycles of your computer is, for me, part of citizen science. However, in different […]
A citizens observatory is a concept that evolved at EU policy circles, defining the combination of participatory community monitoring, technology and governance structures that are needed to monitor/observe/manage an environmental issue. About two years ago, the EU FP7 funded 5 citizens observatory projects covering areas from water management to biodiversity monitoring. A meeting at Brussels was […]
When you look at the discussions that are emerging around the term ‘Citizen Science‘, you can often find discussion about the ‘Citizen‘ part of the term. What about the ‘Science‘ part? This is something that once you start being involved in Citizen Science you are forced to contemplate. As Francois Grey like to note ‘Science is too important […]
About a month ago, Francois Grey put out a suggestion that we should replace the term ‘bottom-up’ science with upscience – do read his blog-post for a fuller explanation. I have met Francois in New York in April, when he discussed with me the ideas behind the concept, and why it is worth trying to use it. […]
Some ideas take long time to mature into a form that you are finally happy to share them. This is an example for such thing. I got interested in the area of Philosophy of Technology during my PhD studies, and continue to explore it since. During this journey, I found a lot of inspiration and links […]
Some ideas take long time to mature into a form that you are finally happy to share them. This is an example for such thing. I got interested in the area of Philosophy of Technology during my PhD studies, and continue to explore it since. During this journey, I found a lot of inspiration and links […]
The second day of the summit (see my reflections on the first day) started with an unplanned move to the Darwin Lecture Theatre of UCL. This was appropriate, as the theatre is sited in a place where Charles Darwin used to live, and he is mentioned many times as a citizen scientist. Moreover, the unplanned […]
The second day of the summit (see my reflections on the first day) started with an unplanned move to the Darwin Lecture Theatre of UCL. This was appropriate, as the theatre is sited in a place where Charles Darwin used to live, and he is mentioned many times as a citizen scientist. Moreover, the unplanned […]
The Citizen Cyberscience Summit that will be running in London this week sparked the interest of the producers of BBC World Service ‘Click’ programme, and it was my first experience of visiting BBC Broadcasting House – about 15 minutes walk from UCL. Here is the clip from the programme that covers the discussion about the […]
The term ‘Citizen Science’ is clearly gaining more recognition and use. It is now get mentioned in radio and television broadcasts, social media channels as well as conferences and workshops. Some of the clearer signs for the growing attention include discussion of citizen science in policy oriented conferences such as UNESCO’s World Summit on Information Society […]
Geographic and scientific information created by amateur citizens, represents a shift from authoritative data towards information generated by the general public through collaboration. The increasing emergence of such data has been brought about by the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, and mirrors other information sharing activities such as Wikipedia and Flickr. Such activity has also […]