Third international ECSA conference report: Encounters in citizen science

Encounters in Citizen Science, the third international ECSA conference, aimed to bring together the citizen science community - citizen scientists and practitioners, researchers and policymakers - to share the latest knowledge and ideas from the field. The conference was due to be held in Trieste, Italy, in May 2020, but as Covid-19 swept across the world, it soon became clear that we would need to move the conference online.

While this presented some challenges in terms of logistics and the loss of face-to-face networking, it also created opportunities. Notably, more people were able to get involved, including those from outside of Europe and those who may not have been able to attend an onsite conference.

Spread across five days, the online conference saw 507 participants involved in 30 sessions, 64 posters, three keynote speeches, three side events, numerous Zoom chats and hundreds of tweets. It would be difficult to capture everything that took place in one document; instead, this report aims to give you a flavour of the ECSA 2020 conference.