Session Title: Civic Science and Citizen Science (breakout from larger Cit Sci and OSH group)
Date: 23-Mar-2017
Attendees (who was there?):
- Leonardo Sehn (meteorlogical stations)
- Laura Olalde (co production w/ scientists, molecular structures and art)
- Tarunima Prabhakar (How science and democracy are linke)
- Shannon Dosemagen (Public Lab)
- Hagit Keysar
- Lawrence Nderu
- Jeffe Van H
- Gina Leite
- Juan P Maestre
- Fernando Castro
- Hamilton Mestizo
- Mohanty
- Nur Akbar Arofatullah
- Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
- David Bild
Overview of topic (3-6 sentences):
How to align scientific community, NGO, and community-community interests?
How do we get communities engaged to citizen science as a solution? Is it a solution?
Distinctions between citizen science vs community science vs civic science
Tension between expertise and community involvement
What are the incentives/motivations for participation?
How do we avoid the hierarchies in our work?
Notes:
Shannon: Identify the issue problem. Is it important for people build hardware?
Thomas: Avoid citizen exploitation (scientist gives technology to citizen to collect data for them). Work toward endogenous (from within development)
-Facilitate community needs
Hagit: Muki Haklay (citizen science spectrum and not to judge where it falls on the spectrum) we should be critical but careful about criticism.
Thomas: community-based research
Shannon: At what point does the question of inquiry become more than the tools?
Mining issue in a community, they wanted baseline data and don’t really care about the low cost collaborative development of tool. So, at what point do you abandon that model and just give them the tool?
Lawrence: the importance of soft skills, facilitation in community engagement
Hagit: what is the image of the civic scientist?
Whole group reconvene
Thomas: Local knowledge and cognitive justice, not only traditional or ancient knowledge but endogenous knowledge. All knowledge is equal (india)
Hagit: how can we do with civic science what was done with human rights (i.e. balancing particularity and universality)? how do allow hardware for civic science to become universal?
Thomas: positivism (add to this)
Leonardo: we are all privileged in one way or another, so how can we contribute to finding solutions?
Akbar: use of hardware depends on the purpose of the project. some projects don’t require hardware (awareness raising)
Gina: on exploitation - people have different motivations for participation…we need to understand the different reasons why people are participating.
Shannon: not everything should be considered citizen science. what does citizen mean? it’s such a loaded term, do we want to have OSH under that banner?
Thomas: what are the examples of citizens making prototype of and scientists use that hardware? where is the credit, acknowledgement, compensation given to that citizen?