Supporting Citizen Participatory Science Communities

On 28 October, 15:00-16:00 UTC (in your timezone): the next Fireside Chat will take place on citizen and participatory research.

At its origins, the citizen and participatory science movement emerged as a way of including civil society in the process of scientific research, with the notion of making it more accessible for amateur and non-professional scientists, individuals, and communities. With it came the growth of projects in the natural sciences, alongside crowdsourcing platforms and other means of enabling public data collection. As the movement has grown to include social and behavioural sciences, citizen science has also asked foundational questions about the scientific process itself, asking questions about who science has historically included and excluded, who does and does not have power, and how scientific research can adapt participatory approaches to learning, decision-making, and communication. From these questions have emerged projects that aim to employ peer-production and user-centred design, aiming to include populations that are usually talked about or to, but not worked with and empowered to steward the scientific process. This fireside chat brings together different projects within citizen science and participatory research to ask questions like: how has citizen science and participatory approaches changed the landscape of scientific research, and challenged its foundations? How do these projects enable participatory practices and communities? What challenges have these projects faced in an evolving digital landscape?

Chaired by Georgia Aitkenhead (AutSPACEs) and Anne Lee Steele (The Turing Way), this panel will feature insights from Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (OpenHumans), Pen-Yuan Tsing (MammalWeb), James Scott (Center for Digital Ethics and Innovation - CDEI), and Marc Kuchner (National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA). These individuals represent different expertise, industries, and understandings of citizen science and participatory research in diverse contexts (read their bios below).

We will also facilitate open discussions with attendees to learn about their perspectives on the topic via a shared document (links shared upon registration). The zoom room will be held open for an additional 30 minutes after the panel discussion to allow for questions from the audience and wider community, from 16:00 - 16:30 UTC.

This event is hosted by The Turing Way - a community-led handbook on data science and research and AutSPACEs - a a community-led citizen science project to investigate how sensory processing differences affect the ways autistic people navigate the world

The Fireside Chat series features experts, champions and their projects from across different international communities in reproducibility, open research, ethics, collaboration and everything in between. We invite interested communities to get in touch with us to host a next session (email: theturingway@gmail.com) and help catalyse cross-community collaboration and knowledge sharing.

About the speakers

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is a researcher in the field of citizen science. Coming from a background in biology and bioinformatics, his work now focuses on how to support a larger audience in doing science by themselves. In his work he particularly works with patients and patient groups to help them answer their own research questions, most recently within the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research.

Dr Pen-Yuan Hsing started MammalWeb, a growing citizen science project for ecological monitoring across five European countries, and is a strong advocate for open science and free culture (as in “freedom”, not price). Pen created an online course on open science, edited a guide to reproducible code for scientists, contributes in an advisory role to NASA and UNESCO’s open science effort, and was among the first to receive official certification from the Creative Commons organisation on open licenses. Pen has been invited to speak on citizen science and open science at various international meetings, and contributes in an advisory role to NASA’s open science efforts. Pen also serves in the elected leadership of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH), a network of citizen scientists, academics, and grassroots researchers across six continents implementing 100% open source hardware and software in scientific research. In the future, Pen hopes to work with you to creatively expand the circle of liberty for knowledge and innovation.

James Scott is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) which is a directorate of DCMS focused on ensuring trustworthy and ethical innovation on technology and artificial intelligence. James has previously worked in a range of policy, project management and research and analysis roles across government, including in the Behavioural Insights Team at HMRC. As a person with dyspraxia, he is passionate about the opportunities afforded by technology to support diversity and provide opportunity. He has been involved in AutSPACE’S since the beginning of the project, providing both strategic insights and lived experience and is co-lead on the platform’s moderation strategy. James is also actively involved in promoting disability rights and inclusion as Co-Chair of the DCMS Ability Network.

Marc Kuchner is the Citizen Science Officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. His job is to foster citizen science at NASA, overseeing a portfolio of roughly 29 NASA-funded citizen science projects, reaching more than two million volunteers. An astrophysicist, Kuchner began his work on citizen science leading two popular projects Disk Detective and Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. With the help of more than 200,000 members of the public, these projects discovered the Peter Pan disk phenomenon, the first extreme T subdwarfs, and most of the known ultracool brown dwarfs. Besides citizen science, Kuchner is known for work on imaging of disks and exoplanets, for which he received an early career achievement award from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He co-invented the band-limited coronagraph, a design used on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

About the facilitators

Georgia Aitkenhead is a researcher at The Alan Turing Institute specialising in participatory and citizen science and neurodiversity. She works on AutSPACEs: an open-source project to co-create a citizen science platform which will investigate sensory processing and autism. Prior to joining the Turing Institute, she was a member of the digital, data and technology fast stream for the UK’S civil service, which included strategic policy work and digital transformation across multiple departments, including the foreign office and HMRC’s behavioural insights team. She has also taught and mentored students in Beijing, and holds a Batchelor’s degree from the University of Oxford and an MA from Cambridge, both in English literature. Fundamental to her career has been involvement in a number of supportive communities of practice, including Open Life Sciences, The Turing Way, and Mozilla. She is driven by a “nothing about us without us” philosophy. This comes originally from the disability rights movement, but it captures an ideal of involving people in research and elsewhere for whom there is most at stake, and giving power to those who need it.

Anne Lee Steele is the Community Manager for The Turing Way at the Alan Turing Institute, where she facilitates a collaborative resource for reproducible data science, and supports an open source community in developing practices for researchers and practitioners around the world. She has worked on a variety of projects in the open ecosystem, including at the Internet Society, Wikimedia Deutschland, and Open Knowledge Foundation, and is passionate about the capacity for open source practices to make research more accessible, collaborative, and inclusive. She holds a BA from Columbia University and MA from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, both in anthropology and sociology. Previously, she worked in the data journalism and education fields.

About the hosting organisations

AutSPACEs is a community-led citizen science project to investigate how sensory processing differences affect the ways autistic people navigate the world. It is supported by The Alan Turing Institute, Open Humans, and Autistica. The platform is designed for autistic individuals and their supporters to share their experiences of the world so that the autistic community, allies, and researchers can understand relationships between sensory processing and autism. This session will discuss ways in which open-source technologies can support the development of a citizen science project while prioritizing the wellbeing and empowerment of its neurodiverse community.

The Turing Way is an open source, open collaboration, and community-driven handbook on Data Science. We involve and support a diverse community of contributors to make research and data science accessible, comprehensible and effective for everyone. Our goal is to provide all the information that researchers and data scientists in academia, industry and the public sector need to ensure that the projects they work on are easy to reproduce and reuse. The Turing Way book currently hosts five guides with over 250 live pages as chapters and subchapters on best practices, co-developed by 325 contributors on GitHub.

For more information, or to express your interest to join as a speaker or host, please reach out to The Turing Way team by emailing theturingway@gmail.com.