Finding Pathways to More Equitable and Meaningful Public-Scientist Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniela Soleri et al in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice: “For many, citizen science is exciting because of the possibility for more diverse, equitable partnerships in scientific research with outcomes considered meaningful and useful by all, including public participants. This was the focus of a symposium we organized at the 2015 conference of the Citizen Science Association. Here we synthesize points made by symposium participants and our own reflections.

Professional science has a participation problem that is part of a larger equity problem in society. Inequity in science has negative consequences including a failure to address the needs and goals arising from diverse human and social experiences, for example, lack of attention to issues such as environmental contamination that disproportionately impact under-represented populations, and a failure to recognize the pervasive effects of structural racism. Inequity also encourages mistrust of science and scientists. A perception that science is practiced for the sole benefit of dominant social groups is reinforced when investigations of urgent community concerns such as hydraulic fracturing are questioned as being biased endeavors.

Defined broadly, citizen science can challenge and change this inequity and mistrust, but only if it reflects the diversity of publics, and if it doesn’t reinforce existing inequities in science and society. Key will be the way that science is portrayed: Acknowledging the presence of bias in all scientific research and the tools available for minimizing this, and demonstrating the utility of science for local problem solving and policy change. Symposium participants called for reflexive research, mutual learning, and other methods for supporting more equitable engagement in practice and in the activities of the Citizen Science Association…(More)”.

Citizen Generated Data In Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DataShift: “No-one can communicate the importance of citizen-generated data better than those who are actually working with it. At DataShift, we want to highlight the civil society organisations who have told us about the tangible results they have achieved through innovative approaches to harnessing data from citizens.

Each essay profiles the objectives, challenges and targets of an organisation using data generated by citizens to achieve their goals. We hope that the essays in this collection can help more people feel more confident about asking questions of the data that affects their lives, and taking a hands-on approach to creating it. (More)”

ESSAYS

VOZDATA

People and collaborative technology are helping to redefine Argentina’s fourthestate

SCIENCE FOR CHANGE KOSOVO (SFCK)

Collaborative citizen science to tackleKosovo’s air pollution problem and simultaneously engage with a politically disenfranchised generation of young people

Design principles for engaging and retaining virtual citizen scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dara M. Wald, Justin Longo and A. R. Dobell at Conservation Biology: “Citizen science initiatives encourage volunteer participants to collect and interpret data and contribute to formal scientific projects. The growth of virtual citizen science (VCS), facilitated through websites and mobile applications since the mid-2000s, has been driven by a combination of software innovations and mobile technologies, growing scientific data flows without commensurate increases in resources to handle them, and the desire of internet-connected participants to contribute to collective outputs. However, the increasing availability of internet-based activities requires individual VCS projects to compete for the attention of volunteers and promote their long-term retention. We examined program and platform design principles that might allow VCS initiatives to compete more effectively for volunteers, increase productivity of project participants, and retain contributors over time. We surveyed key personnel engaged in managing a sample of VCS projects to identify the principles and practices they pursued for these purposes and led a team in a heuristic evaluation of volunteer engagement, website or application usability, and participant retention. We received 40 completed survey responses (33% response rate) and completed a heuristic evaluation of 20 VCS program sites. The majority of the VCS programs focused on scientific outcomes, whereas the educational and social benefits of program participation, variables that are consistently ranked as important for volunteer engagement and retention, were incidental. Evaluators indicated usability, across most of the VCS program sites, was higher and less variable than the ratings for participant engagement and retention. In the context of growing competition for the attention of internet volunteers, increased attention to the motivations of virtual citizen scientists may help VCS programs sustain the necessary engagement and retention of their volunteers….(More)”

Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Esther Landhuis at NPR: “Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.

An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”

The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.

RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.

Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.

Khatri was intrigued by the notion of engaging the public to solve problems. His lab develops novel diagnostics using publicly available data sets. The team had just published a paper on a set of genes that could help diagnose sepsis and had other papers under review on influenza and TB.

In an “Aha!” moment during their dinner chat, Khatri says, he and Das realized “how awesome it would be to sequentially merge our two approaches — to use public data to find a diagnostic marker for a disease, and then use the public’s help to develop the test.”

TB seemed opportune as it has a simple diagnostic signature — a set of three human genes that turn up or down predictably after TB infection. When checked across gene data on thousands of blood samples from 14 groups of people around the globe, the behavior of the three-gene set readily identified people with active TB, distinguishing them from individuals who had latent TB or other diseases.

Those findings, published in February, have gotten serious attention — not only from curious patients and doctors but also from humanitarian groups eager to help bring a better TB test to market. It can currently take several tests to tell whether a person has active TB, including a chest X-ray and sputum test. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has started sending data to help the Stanford team validate a test based on the newly identified TB gene signature, says study leader Khatri, who works at the university’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research….(More)”

Science to the People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lang on how citizen science bridges the gap between science and society: “It’s hard to find a silver lining in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The striking images of jugs of brown water being held high in protest are a symbol of institutional failure on a grand scale. It’s a disaster. But even as questions of accountability and remedy remain unanswered, there is already one lesson we can take away: Citizen science can be used as a powerful tool to build (or rebuild) the public’s trust in science.

Because the other striking image from Flint is this: Citizen-scientists  sampling and testing their own water, from their homes and neighborhoods,and reporting the results as scientific data. Dr. Marc Edwards is the VirginiaTech civil engineering professor who led the investigation into the lead levels in Flint’s water supply, and in a February 2016 interview with TheChronicle of Higher Education, he gave an important answer about the methods his team used to obtain the data: “Normal people really appreciate good science that’s done in their interest. They stepped forward as citizen-scientists to explore what was happening to them and to their community,we provided some funding and the technical and analytical expertise, and they did all the work. I think that work speaks for itself.”

It’s a subtle but important message: The community is rising up and rallying by using science, not by reacting to it. Other scientists trying to highlight important issues and influence public opinion would do well to take note, because there’s a disconnect between what science reports and what the general public chooses to believe. For instance, 97 percent of scientists agree that the world’s climate is warming, likely due to human activities. Yet only 70 percent of Americans believe that global warming is real. Many of the most important issues of our time have the same, growing gap between scientific and societal consensus: genetically modified foods, evolution,vaccines are often widely distrusted or disputed despite strong, positive scientific evidence…..

The good news is that we’re learning. Citizen science — the growing trend of involving non-professional scientists in the process of discovery — is proving to be a supremely effective tool. It now includes far more than birders and backyard astronomers, its first amateur champions. Over the past few years,the discipline has been gaining traction and popularity in academic circles too. Involving groups of amateur volunteers is now a proven strategy for collecting data over large geographic areas or over long periods of time.Online platforms like Zooniverse have shown that even an untrained human eye can spot anomalies in everything from wildebeest migrations to Martiansurfaces. For certain types of research, citizen science just works.

While a long list of peer-reviewed papers now backs up the efficacy of citizen science, and a series of papers has shown its positive impact on students’ view of science, we’re just beginning to understand the impact of that participation on the wider perception of science. Truthfully, for now,most of what we know so far about its public impact is anecdotal, as in the work in Flint, or even on our online platform for explorers, OpenExplorer….It makes sense that citizen science should affect public perception of science.The difference between “here are the results of a study” and “please help

It makes sense that citizen science should affect public perception of science.The difference between “here are the results of a study” and “please help us in the process of discovery” is profound. It’s the difference between a rote learning moment and an immersive experience. And even if not everyone is getting involved, the fact that this is possible and that some members of a community are engaging makes science instantly more relatable. It creates what Tim O’Reilly calls an “architecture of participation.” Citizen scientists create the best interface for convincing the rest of the populace.

A recent article in Nature argued that the DIY biology community was, in fact, ahead of the scientific establishment in terms of proactively thinking about the safety and ethics of rapidly advancing biotechnology tools. They had to be. For those people opening up community labs so that anyone can come and participate, public health issues can’t be pushed aside or dealt with later. After all, they are the public that will be affected….(More)”

Crowdcrafting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Crowdcrafting is a web-based service that invites volunteers to contribute to scientific projects developed by citizens, professionals or institutions that need help to solve problems, analyze data or complete challenging tasks that cant be done by machines alone, but require human intelligence. The platform is 100% open source – that is its software is developed and distributed freely – and 100% open-science, making scientific research accessible to everyone.

Crowdcrafting uses PyBossa software: Our open source framework for crowdsourcing projects. Institutions, such as the British Museum, CERN and United Nations (UNITAR), are also PyBossa users.

What is citizen science?

Citizen science is the active contribution of people who are not professional scientists to science. It provides volunteers with the opportunity to contribute intellectually to the research of others, to share resources or tools at their disposal, or even to start their own research projects. Volunteers provide real value to ongoing research while they themselves acquire a better understanding of the scientific method.

Citizen science opens the doors of laboratories and makes science accessible to all. It facilitates a direct conversation between scientists and enthusiasts who wish to contribute to scientific endeavour.

Who and how you can collaborate?

Anyone can create a new project or contribute to an existing project in Crowdcrafting.

All projects start with a simple tutorial explaining how they work and providing all the information required to participate. There is thus no specific knowledge or experience required to complete proposed tasks. All volunteers need is a keen attitude to learn and share science with everyone….(More)”

citizenscience.gov

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“citizenscience.gov is an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government. The site provides a portal to three key components for federal practitioners: a searchable catalog of federally supported citizen science projects, a toolkit to assist with designing and maintaining projects, and a gateway to a community of practice to share best practices.

Wiki-fishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “….Mr Rhoads is a member of a network started by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA), which aims to do something about this and to reduce by-catch of sensitive species such as rockfish at the same time. Network fishermen, who numbered only 20 at the project’s start, agreed to share data on where and what they were catching in order to create maps that highlighted areas of high by-catch. Within two years they had reduced accidental rockfish harvest by as much as 20%.

The rockfish mapping project expanded to create detailed maps of the sea floor, pooling data gathered by transducers fixed to the bottoms of boats. By combining thousands of data points as vessels traverse the fishing grounds, these “wikimaps”—created and updated through crowdsourcing—show gravel beds where bottom-dwelling halibut are likely to linger, craggy terrain where rockfish tend to lurk, and outcrops that could snag gear.

Public charts are imprecise, and equipment with the capability to sense this level of detail could cost a fisherman more than $70,000. Skippers join ALFA for as little as $250, invest a couple of thousand dollars in computers and software and enter into an agreement to turn over fishing data and not to share the information outside the network, which now includes 85 fishermen.

Skippers say the project makes them more efficient, better able to find the sort of fish they want and avoid squandering time on lost or tangled gear. It also means fewer hooks in the water and fewer hours at sea to catch the same amount of fish….(More)”

Citizen Science and the Flint Water Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Wilson Center’s Commons Lab: “In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan decided to switch its water supply source from the Detroit water system to a cheaper alternative, the Flint River. But in exchange for the cheaper price tag, the Flint residents paid a greater price with one of the worst public health crises of the past decade.

Despite concerns from Flint citizens about the quality of the water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly attributed the problem to the plumbing system. It was 37-year-old mother of four, LeeAnne Walters who, after noticing physical and behavioral changes in her children and herself, set off a chain of events that exposed the national scandal. Eventually, with the support of Dr. Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech (VT), Walters discovered lead concentration levels of 13,200 parts per billion in her water, 880 times the maximum concentration allowed by law and more than twice the level the Environmental Protection Agency considers to be hazardous waste.

Citizen science emerged as an important piece of combating the Flint water crisis. Alarmed by the government’s neglect and the health issues spreading all across Flint, Edwards and Walters began the Flint Water Study, a collaboration between the Flint residents and research team from VT. Using citizen science, the VT researchers provided the Flint residents with kits to sample and test their homes’ drinking water and then analyzed the results to unearth the truth behind Flint’s water quality.

The citizen-driven project illustrates the capacity for nonprofessional scientists to use science in order to address problems that directly affect themselves and their community. While the VT team needed the Flint residents to provide water samples, the Flint residents in turn needed the VT team to conduct the analysis. In short, both parties achieved mutually beneficial results and the partnership helped expose the scandal. Surprisingly, the “traditional” problems associated with citizen science, including the inability to mobilize the local constituent base and the lack of collaboration between citizens and professional scientists, were not the obstacles in Flint….(More)”

How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ari Beser at National Geographic: “It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was a chance after the disaster for humanity to innovate our thinking about energy, and that doesn’t seem like it’s happened.  But what we can change is the way we measure the environment around us.”

Franken and his founding partners found a way to turn their email chain, spurred by the tsunami, into Safecast; an open-source network that allows everyday people to contribute to radiation-monitoring.

“We literally started the day after the earthquake happened,” revealed Pieter. “A friend of mine, Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, and I were basically talking about what Geiger counter to get. He was in Boston at the time and I was here in Tokyo, and like the rest of the world, we were worried, but we couldn’t get our hands on anything. There’s something happening here, we thought. Very quickly as the disaster developed, we wondered how to get the information out. People were looking for information, so we saw that there was a need. Our plan became: get information, put it together and disseminate it.”

An e-mail thread between Franken, Ito, and Sean Bonner, (co-founder of CRASH Space, a group that bills itself as Los Angeles’ first hackerspace), evolved into a network of minds, including members of Tokyo Hackerspace, Dan Sythe, who produced high-quality Geiger counters, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer. On April 15, the group that was to become Safecast sat down together for the first time. Ozzie conceived the plan to strap a Geiger counter to a car and somehow log measurements in motion. This would became the bGeigie, Safecast’s future model of the do-it-yourself Geiger counter kit.

Armed with a few Geiger counters donated by Sythe, the newly formed team retrofitted their radiation-measuring devices to the outside of a car.  Safecast’s first volunteers drove up to the city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, and took their own readings around all of the schools. Franken explained, “If we measured all of the schools, we covered all the communities; because communities surround schools. It was very granular, the readings changed a lot, and the levels were far from academic, but it was our start. This was April 24, 6 weeks after the disaster. Our thinking changed quite a bit through this process.”

DSC_0358
With the DIY kit available online, all anyone needs to make their own Geiger counter is a soldering iron and the suggested directions.

Since their first tour of Koriyama, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Safecast’s team of volunteers have developed the bGeigie handheld radiation monitor, that anyone can buy on Amazon.com and construct with suggested instructions available online. So far over 350 users have contributed 41 million readings, using around a thousand fixed, mobile, and crowd-sourced devices….(More)