Held in Frankfurt, Germany on 2018. Sep. 06–07
The annual German Citizen Science(CS) conference was held in Frankfurt this year, with participants from all over Europe, many from the German speaking countries such as Austria and Switzerland. There were participants with different backgrounds; researchers from institutions organizing projects, universities, media and IT specialists providing technology for CS, Web page organizers, government officials, students and citizen scientists (who often had their own CS projects).
The conference started with an impulse speech by an official of the German federal ministry of education and research (BMBF).
The following three points were stressed as the key to further developing the CS branch in Germany. 1) Professional science has to open itself to the public, 2) further and deeper involvement of citizens, and 3) last not least political support.
There are many examples of citizens pointing out what seemed to be a minor environmental problem in the beginning, but later turned out to have global, economical dimensions. When crop pollinating insects such as bees suddenly died in large numbers, citizens were the first to raise the alarm. Quite a few CS projects have emerged from citizens being aware of and concerned to their environment. After the success of the official CS website (buergerschaffenwissen.de), the government decided to fund pilot projects from 2017 to 2019. There were more than 300 applications from projects in various fields, of which 13 were chosen. As the government has taken the initiative to encourage CS, it is important that local administrations follow suit. Another thing one has to be aware of is not to isolate CS, but to integrate it into the existing system.
It has always been a challenge to transfer environmental policies to citizens. CS, however, though probably unintentionally, is playing exactly this role. According to a study, 90% of ones’ thoughts are about personal issues, and only 10% are processing general information. If participating in a CS project attracts the attention of a person, this topic becomes something “personal”, slipping from the 10% zone into the 90% zone. Consequently, this topic gets a completely different dimension of attention in the persons’ mind.
But one also has to be aware of critical issues concerning CS, for example regarding data quality and exploitation of the volunteer spirit of citizens’, their contributions etc. Such criticism has to be dealt with, but it is important not to apply restrictive standards which could lead to the refusal of potential CS projects. One issue, which has to be approached with more detailed and actual knowledge in the future is, the usage of the data obtained through CS. Data usage is problematic — the principle of CS speaks for open access (making the data available for any one), but with the strict privacy regulations nowadays this is not always practicable.
The impulse speech was followed by an intriguing keynote focusing on the results and evaluation of CS projects, by Prof. Dr. Schäfer of the Technical University of Berlin. To improve the research quality and management of projects, it is important to reflect and evaluate the results. Ideally, evaluations should be done at several stages during a project, but as most of the CS projects have started without taking this into account. Most of the current evaluations are done after the end of the project.
As for the impact depth of a project, Prof. Dr. Schäfer introduced a figure with three circles: the centre circle standing for the impact “within” the project, the second, encompassing circle for the “surrounding field areas” and the third circle for the “effect on society as a whole”. In a plastic monitoring project for example, the result that marine plastic is deadly for sea life could make participants change their attitude towards plastic usage (within); other sea animal protecting projects could acknowledge it as one of the great hazards (surrounding field areas), and finally governments could change regulations (effect on society as a whole).
While projects targeting a wide audience — easy to participate projects which anyone can join — are one of the unique characteristic of CS, the number of projects focusing on a specific target group have increased as well. Also, more and more projects are involving citizens not only in monitoring activities but also in planning and designing the project or analyzing the collected data. As the project variety increases, the necessity of appropriate evaluation methods do so, too.
The coffee break was combined with a poster session, where participants had one and a half hour to look at and discuss the projects they were interested in. As I was attending to my own poster “Analysis of the current state of Citizen Science Projects in Germany”, I wasn’t able to look into all of the posters, but of those which I got a chance to see, the way each project was presented was interesting. Some of the projects presented materials and devices featured, such as the Plastikpiraten project (a project researching marine plastic with students), with plastic samples collected from beaches and plastic products which are the source of this kind of pollution.
After the coffee break, participants had the choice between two workshops and project presentations. One of the projects introduced was “senseBox”. The senseBox is a small box with several measuring options such as temperature, humidity, air pressure, luminosity and UV radiation. In the senseBox project, participants can choose to either build their own senceBox from a kit (home version) or an already usable device with basic measuring options such as temperature, which are suitable for using at schools (edu version). The measurement results are mapped on the project website as open source. Now there are more than 2243 senseBoxes all over Europe, generating real time data.
Another project was “Forschungsfall Nachtigall”, a project which partnered with the group that developed an application called Naturblick, to record and analyse the voice of nightingales in Berlin and its surroundings. More than 2000 new melodies were found within this year. The project succeeded to engage a large group of people, by increasing their media presence on TV and the press, and also by taking advantage of opportunities such as the City Nature Challenge. The Austrian official web-page “Österreich forscht” presented their activities. They conducted a survey in 2016 and repeated it in 2018, asking the projects on their website what function they expected of the website. The results showed, that projects expected the website to provide 1) more conferences, 2) a platform function and 3) to help organizing small working groups consisting of projects working in the same field or with the same interest. The interesting point was that although digitalization has made it possible to communicate much more easily (without the need of meeting face to face), projects actually wanted more meetups and direct communication.
In the evening there was an open podium discussion, where participants of the conference as well as citizens where invited to discuss whether CS could contribute to sustainability. It was a very lively discussion, where scientists as well as citizens shared their ideas and experiences.
2018. Sep. 07, Day 2
The second day of the conference started with a keynote by Dr. Nuß from the Senkenberg Museum for Animal Science in Dresden. Insects have always been his great passion, and now he is running a project which works on the registration of insects on the red-list. 21 Out of 25 members are citizen scientists, of which now 5 have passed away and 5 are unable to participate due to high age. The biggest problem is, that there is nobody of the younger generation to continue the project. Many CS projects are facing the same problem, especially ones with a long tradition.
Another problem which is not as obvious at first sight, is the lack of young “professionals” who are able to correctly identify the species which the citizens have collected. As citizens age, so do professionals, and a huge quantity of knowledge is lost, when one such professional retires. The lack of young scientist with the skill of identifying species is due to the fact, that nowadays there are hardly any courses in universities, which specify in this field.
But concerning the lack of younger citizen participants, there are a couple of things a project can devise. One way is to make participation easy by using modern technology. Many projects are working with applications, as most of the young people have a smartphone. There are also new challenges such as the TAGESFALTER SACHSEN application, which can be used without Wi-Fi access.
Another important thing is to respect the participant’s individual choice of the contribution level. For example, although the most accurate way to identify a species is by DNA analysis or morphology, there are participants who refuse to kill or even catch an insect. In this case, the project has to find a way to identify the insect just by sight or by pictures.
There was a workshop session on the second day as well. In the workshop “Chances and Risks of digital CS”, Mr. Hummer started off by explaining how privacy policies affects CS platforms online. Calling himself a digital native, he has invented the CS application “Spotteron” as well as designing web pages for individual projects and for countries.
One always has to be aware, that every klick on the internet is tracked and used as commercial information. Especially applications such as Facebook or Twitter, where the users can show their opinion by “liking”, are the biggest source of personal-data. Personal data refers to any kind of information, which could lead to the identification of a person. These are not only the obvious ones such as name, age, address etc., but also include anonymous data, such as in some of the data collected by CS projects. The new EU privacy regulation (EU-DGSVO), has made handling of personal date stricter. Thus, it is important for CS projects to inform themselves not to violate the regulations. Any web site can be a target for a hacker, and one symptom for infection is when everything on the web site gets slower. As the computer has its own language, and the internet is a vast pool of highly skilled hackers, it is best to ask for professional advice when hosting an online portal. One also has to be aware that maintaining a website is an ongoing process which takes time and money, just the same as having a car.
Dr. Siebenlist from the Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf followed by showing the pros and cons of mobile applications. The positive effects are, that participation as well as getting information of specific fields becomes easier. Digitalization has led to more transparency of local governments and city policies.
The risks are, that most of the activities are done online, so there is no personal contact or opportunity to get feedback for one’s contribution. This could lead to isolation as well as loss of motivation among participants. Another problem which has gained presence in recent years is the overwhelming number of applications. Every project in every region has its own application, making it difficult to share or use the data in a wider area. It also puts the participants into situations where they are not sure which or how many applications they should download.
During the two day conference, I handed out a flyer for CS.Asia, and many participants of the conference showed great interest, especially in which kind of projects already exist in the Asian area.
Forum Citizen Science 2018 was originally published in The CitizenScience.Asia Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
