A short story on citizen science training efforts in different settings, contexts and groups

Presentation. Living Knowledge Conference. Girona.  June 2024.

Many people have approached to us asking for citizen science training. Petitions were coming from organizations like libraries, universities, civil society organizations or research funding agencies… And we most often said: why not? But honestly… we lacked general references and we mostly relied on our own learnings when doing our own citizen science projects. In all cases offered our own vision of citizen science which emphasize the inherent social dimension and looks for social change.

In the first place, public libraries responsible in the Barcelona region saw citizen science to revise the mission of the public libraries and the related tasks and roles of library professionals. We introduced citizen science to cocreate a list of meaningful citizen projects according to their perspectives and particular contexts. In a deeper level, 4 public libraries and their professionals were accompanied in the cocreation of a new citizen science experiment with their own library users and on a particular social issue.

Universities transformative efforts can also see in citizen science a powerful practice. In our university, we have also recently developed a certified training program of 4 hours and 10 hours, but we did that in close collaboration with civil society organizations. Along the same spirit, social innovation module within an innovative recent master program on Sustainability (Charm-EU) that involves 4 European universities can also see in citizen science a way to combine research and transformative action. We there have emphasized the addition of participatory strategies on ongoing students’ projects. 

Other experiences are also related to the need of training for project managers and those persons involved in technical support in scientific projects and to members of civil society organisations. All these efforts combined with other shorter exercises under the form of summer schools and workshops have helped us to reflect on citizen science training strategies. We share all these experiences with the successes, the doubts, and, of course, the failures taking a lively and personal perspective. We will end up by presenting a set of visual materials focused on 6 transversal aspects: communities, action, digital tools, data, ethics, and inclusion and cocreation. We hope that the learnings may help other related initiatives to flourish worldwide in its best way.