The Promise of Participation and Decision-Making Power in Citizen Science

Abstract

Citizen science is challenging professional researchers and their organizations to rethink the way they do science and connect with society. In any citizen science project, professional researchers are "making a promise" to the public about the level of participation and power in decision making that they are willing to provide to citizen scientists. Researchers should set expectations explicitly to ensure informed participation, trust, and motivation. Also, the design of tools for informed consent, information sharing, recognition, and privacy has to be adapted to the new power relations and distributed knowledge production. Based on fieldwork experiences and literature review about environmental and biomedical citizen science, this article examines the challenges and proposes solutions for: 1) setting expectations for informed participation; 2) addressing privacy concerns and adapting informed consent to evolving interests and networked environments; and 3) promoting citizen governance of research data. Citizen science has the potential to both increase scientific literacy and counteract mistrust and skepticism about scientific evidence of global problems (such as climate change) that need to be addressed. However, there are still many challenges to fulfilling the promise of citizen science-for example, empowering people and gaining trust. A few inspiring initiatives help us reflect on a facilitation model for engagement and informed participation; privacy by design; and new governance models for research data provided by citizen scientists.

Public libraries embrace citizen science: strengths and challenges

“…Nevertheless, the librarians expressed a certain unease with the complexity of collaboration, which is to be taken into account during the planning of the participatory dynamics. Some of the main challenges identified are the uncertainty of the open nature of a co-created inquiry 9 , the conflicting stakes at odds in the research process between of citizens, librarians and scientists interests 50 , and the hardship involved in ensuring an equity-driven recruitment and retention of participants during the whole process 51 . Co-created practices indeed modify the relationship between librarians and users towards a more participatory and horizontal interaction.…”

“…Citizen science (CS) broadly refers to the active engagement of the general public in scientific research tasks that are traditionally implemented by scientists 1,2 . Although not new in the history of science 3 there is increasing awareness about its current, and potential, social and political impacts [4][5][6] .…”

“…We herein present the analysis of the one-year project (2018-2019) Citizen Science in Action promoted by the Barcelona Network of Public Libraries (Catalunya -Spain), that coordinates 225 libraries and 2,7M users. The project we implemented was part of the Bibliolab programme [2] whose broad aim is to experiment new forms of open and creative collaborations with citizenry. The project has tested and then analyzed the capacity of assimilation of CS practices in public libraries.…”

Ethical Challenges and Dynamic Informed Consent

“…This means that a one-to-one model of informed consent does not fit the networked structure of citizen science collaborations; new models of consent are needed. Yet, these models of consent require understanding of complex information and concomitant privacy risks, and thus a high level of information literacy which, in turn, calls for new and more inclusive consent procedures (Cheung 2018;Eleta et al 2019) such as the model of dynamic informed consent. Dynamic informed consent is a strategy to involve participants, support the principle of informed consent, and solve the 'stationary' aspect of consent, via a technological construct such as a communication platform that establishes a continuous two-way communication between researchers and participants.…”

Getting to Know Other Ways of Knowing: Boundary Experiences in Citizen Science

“…While project organizers, including staff at the Natural History Museum London, see the use of volunteer-collected data as one way to increase citizen participation, amateur-expert volunteers who contribute data also "lament the fact that environmental planners may not consult naturalists at all during their decisionmaking" (Ellis and Waterton 2004, p. 99). Collaboration in citizen science is often difficult (Golumbic et al 2017;Kasperowski and Hillman 2018); outcomes are not always positive (Eleta et al 2019); and efforts to engage volunteers sometimes fall short (Frensley et al 2017). Heterogeneity of people and practices, it would seem, is both a condition and a challenge for achieving desirable outcomes in citizen science.…”