Over this weekend, London has been the host to the Citizen Cyberscience Summit.
I was asked to attend, and to collect some answers to the following questions to the delegates:
1) What is your vision for the future of citizen science?
2) What do you think the growing citizen science community needs?
What I gathered from the answers was the following:
a) Citizen science needs to be more organised
There are many projects running very similar projects, but some don’t know the others exist. Is there a way that these projects could work together more efficiently, as to avoid confusion to the citizens who are looking for projects? Could they be organised into themes?
b) Citizen science needs more citizens
Projects are gathering in their numbers, but in order for them to take off, they need more citizens to take part. How do you get more citizens involved? And how do you make them aware of what is available to them?
c) Citizen science projects need to be more citizen lead
A lot of citizen science projects are lead by professional scientists. Why not get the citizens to lead projects? Let them come up with the research questions, do the research and analyse the results?
d) Projects need to be easier to find
This ties in a lot with point (b). Projects should be made more visible to the public.
e) That citizen science will become normal
There is hope that citizen science will no longer be something separate. It will become something that sits along traditional science, without the distinction that is isn’t the same.
What do you think?