Report on a survey among organisers of citizen science projects

This report has been compiled within CS Track’s Work Package 2, which, among other objectives, aims to present a first overview of citizen science activities according to geographical location, topics, activities and project coordinators' estimates on the participation of different socio- economic groups and gender distributions within by

• exploring the availability of data about citizen science activities;
• setting up a comprehensive database of citizen science activities that is used for web analytics in Work Package 3;
• conducting a short survey on them; and
• carrying out exemplary qualitative research on selected citizen science projects to generate ideas for maximizing the benefit of citizen science activities for the participants and to unveil incentives, barriers, enablers, disadvantages and benefits.

This report contributes to this objective by presenting the results of a short survey on citizen science activities that has been conducted among project owners.

In an online survey the authors of this report asked project owners, resp. coordinators for the most elementary data 

about the respective project and those who participate(d) in it:

• the project objectives,
• the scientific disciplines involved in the project,
• the type(s) of citizen science activities,
• rough estimates on the participation of different social groups, including their gender and age distributions, and
• questions on practical issues, such as the availability of the respective project for further research.

This might be an indication In line with the authors’ research so far, the survey showed a potential indication that many projects do not know very much about the participants, their characteristics or even their number (or not want to admit to it) and refrain from answering. In view of the benefits that several scholars, practitioners, policy makers and others claim citizen science brings with it, this would make some of them unfounded if not even implausible. Moreover, an attempt was made to investigate – in cases where academics were, respectively are, among the organisers - how far their expertises match(ed) the research areas of the projects. This proved exceptionally tricky because there exists no classification scheme which mirrors the broad variety of academic educations in different regions.