The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper provides the methodological framework for implementing and using Sapelli in the field. Specifically, we present the role of Sapelli within the framework of an “Extreme Citizen Science” (ECS) methodology that is based on participatory design. This approach enables Sapelli’s users to decide, with the help of professional scientists, which challenges they wish to address, what data to collect, how best to collect and analyse it, and how to use it to address the problems identified. The process depends on the consent of participants and that the project is shaped by their decisions. We argue that leaving ample space for co-design, local leadership and keeping Sapelli deployment open-ended is crucial to give all people, and in particular non-literate people who we have found are often the most ecologically literate, access to the power of the scientific process to document and represent their concerns to outsiders in a way that all can understand, and to develop advocacy strategies that address the problems they identify.

Citizen science gets increasing recognition for its potential to democratize science and support environmental governance. In this paper we present our experiences and lessons learned from a set of 'extreme' citizen science initiatives in developing countries, where data collection applications are used to support low-literate people in identifying solutions to issues that are of significant local concern. This paper aims to bring to the attention of the HCI community of developments in extreme citizen science and contribute knowledge to the field of HCI4D, especially to research studies which concern the design and use of smartphones for low-literate users.

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The overwhelming global dominance of modern industrialism stifles the visibility of alternative ways of being in the present and of what solutions to large-scale challenges may be appropriate. This paper describes how novel high-tech digital tools can be co-designed with people with different worldviews or ‘ontologies’ to better represent their normally marginalised understandings, and so begin to generate a pluriverse of localised pathways to address the future. To do so, such digital tools are not considered as technological artefacts but as socio-technical processes designed around local worldviews to encode alternative understandings of local issues and local knowledge into data collection and visualisation processes. We describe how the Sapelli digital mapping tool is implemented through participatory co-design approaches with Indigenous people, farmers, and agro-pastoralists. Representing different cultures and local knowledge systems in a digital third space has revealed a plurality of approaches to addressing environmental change that differ substantially from those conventionally envisaged.