Deliverable 6.2 Guidelines on Best Practice for Citizen Observatories (COs) as part of the Cos4Cloud Outreach Methodology Report

Co-designed Citizen Observatories Services for the European Open Science Cloud (Cos4Cloud, (https://cos4cloud-eosc.eu/) is developing thirteen technological services focused on boosting citizen science observatories to help increase and improve the quantity and quality of observations. 

Cos4Cloud includes the participation of nine established citizen observatories (COs) and Do it Yourself (DIY) initiatives. This includes four focused on biodiversity: Artportalen, iSpotnature, Natusfera, Pl@ntNet; and five focused on the environment: CanAirIO, FreshWater Watch, iSPEX , Kduino, and OdourCollect. 

As part of Cos4Cloud these COs play key overlapping roles as they provide a wide range of expertise contributing to the delivery of the project. This includes the development of technological services; as users and contributors integrating, testing and providing feedback; as well as demonstrators and core stakeholders sharing the services with their user communities exemplifying the outputs of Cos4Cloud i.e. citizen science technologies, supported by their own outreach and engagement with audiences targeted by Cos4Cloud. This report, D6.2 Guidelines on best practice for COs as part of the outreach methodology seeks to highlight some of these contributions.

The focus of this report is to demonstrate best practice in citizen observatories through the experiences of COs directly involved in the project. This is supported through delivery of Task 6.2 Sharing best practice. It brings together insight from a number of sources: networking and engagement with projects of interest; sharing between the COs in Cos4Cloud (i.e. discussions, workshops internal and external reports etc); from the COs contributions / involvement in the co-design of the technological services; and from two questionnaire surveys facilitated with the CO leads gathering feedback to directly capture information, best practice and lessons learned. This has been collated contributing to knowledge transfer and consolidated into the development of guidelines of best practice which are being shared through the Cos4Cloud Toolbox and Evidence Hub.