Can citizen science deliver to

society?

Speaker Name: Ralph Dum

Speaker Affiliation: European Commission

Session Organiser: Stephane Berghmans

ICT is changing the way we interact, create, and innovate:New opportunities for citizen empowerment arise

ICT allows massive scaling

• 'Online Alexandrian library': wikipedia....

• 'Online Agora': social media like blogs, twits, facebook, …

• New business models (amazon – e-bay - Uber)

• Information and data abundance (wait for IOT!)

• 'How to make (almost) everything’ : 3D printing, fablabs,,,,

What uses for society?

Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence (CI)

ICT is not replacing human intelligence (AI) but federating intelligence(s) to

arrive collectively at novel solutions to urgent problems (CI).

Citizen science: Open access to knowledge and data

Joint gathering/verification of facts

Co-creation: Open access to tools of production

DIY ....maker movement....

Citizen engagement – 'online Polis': Narrative power decoupled from authority

ICT allows (co-)constructing new narratives that guide society.

You are here

Internet universe – connecting everybody

OPEN SCIENCE

OPEN INNOVATION

OPEN CULTURE

Street-level mapping in London of noise and air pollution

(nitrogen dioxide)

• Mobile phones of volunteers equipped with sensors and apps

• Volunteers collectively construct a pollution map of London

• Volunteers also annotate their data (noisy, smelly, (un)pleasant…)

From collective data to social change?

Hints on possible impact/feedback of the data collectively gathered

on individual and collective behavior .

Collective mapping

and

behavioural change

EC funded project EVERYAWARE

http://www.everyaware.eu/

'A data state of mind:

data can change mindsets ' (Hans Roslin)

"Revolutions do not happen when a society adopts new tools but

only when it adopts novel behaviors". (Clay Shirky)

The Cons

If everybody is a scientist, why science education? Scientific practice needs to be respected.Crowdsourcing does not replace thinking.

Role of the 'expert': Debasing the scientific currency In public (online) space expert findings (the 'truth') become one opinion among many.

Methodological issues:e.g. Data quality and curation.

Pros and Cons:Many opportunities and a lot of hype

Can citizen science deliver to society?

Fermín Serrano Sanz,

Executive Director Ibercivis Foundation

2015 Open laboratories

2014 Collective intelligence

2013 Policy making on citizen science governance

2012 Crowdsourcing analysis of scientific data

2011 Volunteer sensing for data collection

2010 Participatory experiments

2009 Serious games

2016 CS Observatories

National foundation to support and promote CS experiments and activities

2008 Volunteer computing

10 years +50K citizen scientists, +50 experiments +40 research groups

Citizen Science

Observatory

In Spain

Physics, Biotechnolohy,

Human Behaviour, ICT, Mathematics,

Environmental monitoring, Biodiversity,

Social Sciences, Humanites, Economics, Arts,

Protyping,Robotics, A.I, Epidemiology, etc.

a map of odour nuisance reports using the nose of volunteers

a tool to trigger policy action

3rd MYGEOSS Call for innovative apps 2016

Are we able to find new research questions and new approaches thanks to citizen science?

PROS & CONS

Society is delivering to Science all along the research workflow

Citizen science adds new values (not only scientific)

to science, to society and to science-society interactions

But the win-win is unbalanced ACADEMIA PULL > SOCIETY PUSH

(*) Join #CitSciChat TODAY on RRI and #citizenscience

From 16h to 17h Manchester time

Can Citizen Science

deliver to society?