In two weeks time, the 3rd Citizen Cyberscience Summit will be held in London.
In the past few months, I’ve been working closely with some of the Citizen Cyberlab team, making some videos of events they attend and running their podcast Citizens of Science, and have watched them get ready for the 2014 Citizen Cyberscience Summit.
It’s traditionally been more of a conference event with speakers who specialise in different areas of citizen science. This year, it’s taking on more and more.
I spoke to the organisers to get an idea of what is to come:
Citizen science has grown phenomenally over the past few years, expanding beyond volunteer computing to volunteer thinking and many other ideas. It’s becoming so big that even, as Muki Haklay said, policies are needed and the commercial industries are starting to become interested.
What is also unusual about this event is that it is the first time I have heard (correct me if I am wrong) of a conference bringing both the professional and amateur scientists together to discuss old, current and new projects. Citizen science is no longer about the professional scientists setting the projects and citizens just collecting data. It has become an engagement between two groups who each have an equal desire in seeing a project done well. I explored this with several people in the Citizens of Science podcast series: what is science?
I’m particularly looking forward to the event, and will be roaming around to catch some sound bites and videos for those who cant make it.
If you want to find out more about the event, you can follow @CitizenCyberlab on Twitter and use the hashtag #ccs14.