The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
This is the second post about papers in the special collection of papers in the journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice” was dedicated to Policy Perspectives of Citizen Science. The first paper is described in this post. It is fairly rare to be able to catch an image close to the time when a concept … Continue reading How Does Citizen Science “Do” Governance? Reflections from the DITOs Project
Continue reading »As part of the EU-Citizen.Science project, UCL is leading on the training work package. This means that we coordinate the part of the platform that will help to store and share training material for citizen science projects, and generally for the field (such as the UCL online course). The stay at the Centre for Research … Continue reading What can we learn from analysing citizen science training materials?
Continue reading »This is an invitation to complete a survey that is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7XN5MQG This survey will present you stories about different forms of public participation in research. Different activities within this area of public participation in research are now called “citizen science” and we would like to hear what your opinion is about each activity. … Continue reading Would you call this a citizen science activity?
Continue reading »ActEarly is a new project, which has started in September. The project is a 5 years “city collaboratory” in Bradford and Tower Hamlets to research early promotion of good health and wellbeing. The project is part of a set of projects that are funded under the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) scheme, which includes an alliance of … Continue reading ActEarly – outline paper published
Continue reading »Back in October 2018, I reported on the workshop at the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis (IIASA) about non-traditional data approaches and the Sustainable Development Goals. The outcome of this workshop has now been published in Nature Sustainability. The writing process was coordinated by Dr Linda See of IIASA, and with a distributed process that included … Continue reading Published: Citizen science and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Continue reading »The final output from the Urban Zoo project is out (see the post about the previous paper, which was published in GEO). This one is a literature and analysis of the role of urbanisation in zoonosis. The paper is open access, so you can read it here. It was led by Dr Sohel Ahmed (and … Continue reading New paper: Does urbanization make emergence of zoonosis more likely? Evidence, myths and gaps
Continue reading »I find it enjoyable when different strands of research come together. In many ways, research on the impacts of natural hazards on society – or Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), citizen science, and volunteer geographic information (VGI) are parallel research areas with research communities that work on each of them, and only occasionally come together. The … Continue reading New paper: Global mapping of citizen science projects for disaster risk reduction
Continue reading »A new paper, led by Artemis Skarlatidou, was just published in the journal “Citizen Science: Theory and Practice”, describing how stakeholder mapping can be used in co-created citizen science projects. The workshop was part of the COST Action on citizen science, and the NERC Engaging Environment project “Into the night” was one of the case … Continue reading New paper: The Value of Stakeholder Mapping to Enhance Co-Creation in Citizen Science Initiatives
Continue reading »The Urban Zoo project focused on the issues of transfer of disease from animals to humans, in particular in the context of Nairobi, Kenya. This is mostly a medical study, but through the involvement of UCL Development Planning Unit (DPU), issues of urban planning and urban studies were integrated. The new paper “Participatory mapping and food‐centred … Continue reading New paper: Participatory mapping and food‐centred justice in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya
Continue reading »These are the notes from an event at UCL on 1st July 2019 part of Scaling (H2020 project) – innovations in Living Labs. The chair was Jack Stilgoe – Associate Professor, Science and Technology Studies, University College London. The second part of it emerged from Tom Wakefield at the ETC group which is looking at early … Continue reading Experiments outside the laboratory: Who should decide? (notes)
Continue reading »This is the second part of the plenary element of the DITOs final event and again, I’m reblogging Alice Sheppard’s notes (and editing them lightly): The second part of the This is a continuation after the morning’s sessions. The session is based on a panel of other projects that have done work in Europe separately from … Continue reading DITOs final event (2): Doing It Together beyond DITOs
Continue reading »This is a reblogging of the reporting from DITOs final event, which was blogged by Alice Sheppard (which I’ve edited, lightly): Introduction to the day Camille Pisani, the Director of RBINS praises numerous volunteers and collaborators who have worked together, and the way different activities have been aimed at reaching many different audiences. There have … Continue reading Doing It Together Science (DITOs) final event talks (part 1)
Continue reading »The EU-Citizen.Science is a new project that is part of a family of citizen science projects that are funded through the Science with and for Society (SwafS) stream of the Horizon 2020 programme. The project started in January and will run for 3 years. It is coordinated by the Natural History Museum of Berlin (the … Continue reading EU-Citizen.Science project kick-off meeting
Continue reading »One of the joys of the Doing it Together Science project is that it provides opportunities to work closely with different partners from very different areas. One such a collaboration is with Bruno Strasser and his group at the University of Geneva who are researching citizen science from an STS/history of science perspective. Over the … Continue reading Citizen Science: Expertise, Democracy and Public Participation – Report for Swiss Science Council
Continue reading »I’ve mentioned in the previous posts about the introduction and conclusions chapters in the book “Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy” and the chapter about citizen science in universities. The final chapter in the book that I would like to highlight is my chapter “participatory citizen science“. As Rick Bonney pointed to me, on the face … Continue reading New publication: Participatory citizen science
Continue reading »The afternoon and concluding session of the workshop (here are part 1 and part 2) Making as Dissent: The Performance of Producing Pharmaceuticals in Biohacking (Gabriela A. Sanchez, University of Geneva, Switzerland) looking at laboratory protocol to develop insulin and the researchers want to use a 50 years protocol. The Open Insulin Project at the Counter … Continue reading Science & Dissent – Day 2 – Afternoon session, round table and conclusion
Continue reading »The following recording is from the Geothink & Learn lunchtime webinar. The call for the event stated: “Should it be only people with graduate degree who make extraordinary scientific discoveries? Maybe not. Citizen scientists around the world have contributed to new discoveries in fields such as astronomy, biology, meteorology, geography, public health, and more. It … Continue reading Geothink & Learn citizen science session
Continue reading »On the 27th April, UCL hosted a workshop on the “Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science“. The workshop description was as follows: “A decade ago, in 2007, Michael Goodchild defined volunteered geographic information (VGI) as ‘the widespread engagement of large numbers of private citizens, often with little in the way of formal … Continue reading Lessons learned from Volunteers Interactions with Geographic Citizen Science – Morning session
Continue reading »On the 19th March, as part of UCL activities to the that accompany the UCL Exhibition “Disruptors and Innovators: Journeys in gender equality at UCL”, we hosted a panel of talks on how to open up science and engineering to new audiences, especially the representation of women in science. The event was called “Representation of … Continue reading Representation of the people in science: Women in civic and citizen science – event summary
Continue reading »One of the lovely aspects of scientific research is its international dimension – the opportunity to collaborate with people from different places, cultures, and necessarily practices and points of view. During 2017, Dr Chnming Li, of the Institute of Urban Environment of the Chinese Academy of Science, was a visiting researcher in ExCiteS. Dr Li … Continue reading Participatory soundscape sensing – joint paper with Dr Chunming Li
Continue reading »The Doing It Together Science (DITOs) project is now in its 20th Month. It is a 3-year project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme, that is aimed to increase awareness of and participation in citizen science across Europe and beyond. As such, it is focused on communication, coordination, and support of citizen science activities. Therefore, … Continue reading DITOs, Doing It TOgether Science – introductory video
Continue reading »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
A new paper that is based on the PhD work of Valentine Seymour is out. Valentine has been researching the patterns of volunteering in environmental projects at the organisation The Conservation Volunteers. In the paper, we draw parallels between the activities of environmental volunteers and citizen science participants. The analysis demonstrates that the patterns of … Continue reading New paper – Exploring Engagement Characteristics and Behaviours of Environmental Volunteers
Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation is a new open access journal, addressing the interdisciplinary field that links different aspects of remote sensing (the use of different imaging and sensing technologies) and the field of ecology and conservation. It is publishing its papers in Open Access, so the papers are free to download and share. … Continue reading Call for Papers in a special issue of Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation on citizen science
An aspect of collaborative projects is that they start slowly, and as they become effective and productive, they reached their end! The COST Energic (European Network for Research into Geographic Information Crowdsourcing) led to many useful activities, with some of them leading to academic papers. From COST Energic, we’ve got the European Handbook on Crowdsourced Geographic … Continue reading The Potential of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Future Transport Systems
The GIScience conference is being held every two years since 2000, and it is one of the main conferences in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). It is a special honour to be invited to give a keynote talk, and so I was (naturally) very pleased to get an invitation to deliver such a talk … Continue reading Has GIScience Lost its Interdisciplinary Mojo?
I’ve mentioned the European Handbook for Crowdsourced Geographic Information in the last post, and explained how it came about. My contribution to the book is a chapter titled ‘Why is Participation Inequality Important?‘. The issue of participation inequality, also known as the 90:9:1 rule, or skewed contribution, has captured my interest for a while now. … Continue reading Published: Why is Participation Inequality Important?
COST ENERGIC is a network of researchers across Europe (and beyond) that are interested in research crowdsourced geographic information, also known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). The acronym stands for ‘Co-Operation in Science & Technology’ (COST) through ‘European Network Researching Geographic Information Crowdsourcing’ (ENREGIC). I have written about this programme before, through events such as twitter … Continue reading New book: European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information
At the beginning of the Challenging Risk project, the project team considered that before we go out and develop participatory tools to engage communities in earthquake and fire preparedness, we should check what is available. To achieve that, we have commissioned Enrica Verrucci to help us with the review, and later on other members of the … Continue reading New paper: Digital engagement methods for earthquake and fire preparedness
‘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
We have a new scholarship opening at the Extreme Citizen Science group for a PhD student who will research in Human Computer Interaction and Spatial Data Quality for Online Civic Engagement. The studentship is linked and contextualised by the European Union H2020 funded project, WeGovNow! . This project will focus on the use of digital technologies for effectively … Continue reading New PhD Opportunity: Human Computer Interaction and Spatial Data Quality for Online Civic Engagement
The winter edition of Esri ArcNews (which according to Mike Gould of Esri, is printed in as many copies as Forbes) includes an article on the activities of the Extreme Citizen Science group in supporting indigenous groups in mapping. The article highlights the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) aspects of the work, and mentioning many members of … Continue reading Extreme Citizen Science in Esri ArcNews
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)
Under the leadership of Roger Fradera of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, I was involved as a co-author on a ‘thinkpiece’ about citizen science and the nexus. If you haven’t come across the term, ‘nexus’ is the linkage of food, energy, water and the environment as a major challenge for the future. The paper is … Continue reading New publication: Citizen Science and the Nexus (water, energy, food, population)
As the event blurb explained “the Giving Time experiments were led by a team from four UK universities, who wanted to know whether sharing information about how others have volunteered could help to improve volunteering… this was about giving time – and whether volunteers can be nudged. The methodology was randomised control trial (RCTs) in real-life … Continue reading Giving time – randomised experiments on volunteering and citizen social science
The book ‘Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street‘ is launched today. It’s open access and free for you to download and read. The book is edited by Laura Vaughan, who led two research projects in which I was involved as co-investigator. First, ‘Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres‘ (2006-2009) and then ‘Adaptable … Continue reading Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street
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
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 Citizen Cyberlab research project is asking for your help in understanding how citizen science projects can be designed to help you learn more about their scientific topic of the project, and making participation more interesting and useful for you. In addition to general understanding of why and how people take part in citizen sciences … Continue reading Making participation in citizen science interesting & useful – survey