Science Programme - All open sessions

Format: 10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Xavier Basagaña, Valeria Righi

Citizen science is increasingly being used in health-related research. For example, citizens can help track epidemics in real time, contribute to important scientific research about folding proteins, or explore questions such as how pollution and odours are affecting our health. In this session, we will focus on issues around data quality, methodologies and research results, and on how citizen science in health and biomedical research can be integrated into policy making.

Format: 10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Kris Vanherle

One of the key challenges for our future on a healthy planet is to create sustainable cities and communities with sustainable energy and mobility. Citizen science has a great potential to involve society in this process with creative ways and true-to-life issues. How can we produce scientific knowledge in the field of mobility and transport through citizen science (projects)? And, how can this knowledge and data affect policy making on transportation and mobility?

Format: 6-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Gitte Kragh, Jacob Sherson

This session will highlight how embedding citizen science and the SDGs into teaching curricula and education practices can empower people to understand, engage with and help solve local and global challenges, now and in the future. Contributions are invited from the wider citizen science and education communities for six-minute ‘lightning talks’ about innovative and impactful initiatives that focus on empowering young people to contribute to the SDGs through embedding citizen science into educational activities.

Format: 15-minute presentation of best practice examples + discussion; Session organiser: Ina Opitz, Anett Richter

While food consumption and its sustainability is in the hands of consumers, food production in Europe is largely controlled by a few global agricultural companies. The challenge of initiating and establishing responsible food consumption patterns is therefore a significant one. In this session, we will discuss the current relevance of and opportunities for citizen science in research on food consumption and production.

Format: 10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Nike Sommerwerk, Jörg Freyhof, Martina Lutz

Sustainable life on earth requires protection and sustainable management. These need sound knowledge. Here, monitoring is an important tool and essential to reach environmental goals. In this session, we will focus on the integration of citizen research into biodiversity monitoring and thus its current and possible future contribution to national and international reporting obligations. We will also address how to enhance citizen scientists’ access to infrastructure, resources, literature, training, laboratories, as well as coordination services. This will include issues of data storage, data quality assurance and maintenance, method development, metadata creation, planning of data collection and data visualisation.

Format: Short presentations or talks (8-minutes long); Session organiser: Kim Mortega

Lightning talks are short presentations on a particular theme. In this session, projects with significant citizen science activities and achievements will have the opportunity to present their work in relation to other themes relating to the SDGs, such as disaster response, climate change, inequalities, and responsible production and consumption.

Format: 10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Nicola Moczek

There are many stimulating questions in the research on citizen science, especially in the areas of evaluation, quality and communication. Why do citizens participate in citizen science projects? What benefit do they get from it; what benefit does science and reaching the SDGs have? This session will present instruments, evaluation designs as well as results from evaluation and impact research conducted on projects and place them in the context of the promise of citizen science.

Format: Symposium (10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A) with panel discussion or fishbowl conversation; Session organiser: Maike Weißpflug, Marie Delannoy

The Anthropocene – the current age, in which human influence on the earth's surface and biosphere exceeds natural forces – is a widely discussed concept that blurs the boundaries between disciplines, and between non-professional and expert knowledge. This session will discuss whether and how citizen science can be a convincing research approach to the challenges of the Anthropocene. The session combines practical examples of citizen science projects with theoretical reflections on human-nature-relations.

Format: Speed talks (Pecha Kucha) and interactive formats (marketplace, mini-exhibit with e.g. hands-on, demo, videos etc.); Session organiser: Valantis Tsiakos (session organised by WeObserve)

This session invites contributions from Citizen Observatories (COs) and projects that identify as such, to join for an interactive ‘meet-and-greet’ session and to showcase CO tools and innovations that support sustainable development. This session will provide an overview of the current landscape of COs and present innovations from them, such as new methodologies and conceptual models, as well as data innovations from hackathons, innovation and open data challenges. Alongside selected contributions, the WeObserve project will present a co-design toolkit to generate ideas for new COs for public participation, environmental monitoring and disaster management in the context of the SDG framework, as well as results from the WeObserve Open Data Challenge.

Format: Round table with a moderated debate after a short statement (5 min) about conducting citizen social science research on SDGs; Session organiser: Stefan Thomas, David Scheller

In this session, we want to discuss the following questions: What are the specificities and necessities when it comes to citizen social science in the field of SDGs? Do we need a truly participatory and collaborative methodology framework beyond the current debate in CS? Is there a difference between citizen social science and citizen science more generally? Is such a subset within the frame of a general citizen science necessary? What has to be considered if we conduct CSS towards the SDGs?

Format: 10-minute presentation + 5 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Colombe Warin

This session will focus on the importance of sharing knowledge, training materials and resources about citizen science, and of taking stock of the experiences of national platforms as a way of working towards the SDGs. It will also consider the multiplier effect of having one central platform at the European level, EU-Citizen.Science, and the importance of platforms in international collaborations towards the SDGs.

Format: Symposium (7-minute presentation + 3 minutes Q&A) with panel discussion or fishbowl conversation; Session organiser: Jens Jetzkowitz

Citizen science is an established approach in the scientific landscape, and one that is intentionally used for many purposes: developing novel ways to conduct research and innovation, collect and analyse data, empowering citizens to participate with their own ideas in the democratic knowledge society, and communicating principles of scientific thinking to non-academics. To sharpen our understanding of the potential, but also the limitations, of citizen science, this session will bring together speakers to compare normative claims with factual circumstances, and discuss which groups in society are active in citizen science, and which are not. Answers to these questions will lead us to a differentiated assessment of the goals citizen science projects can achieve.

Format: 10-minute presentation + 10 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Jörn Knobloch

A combination of scientific knowledge, governance and institutional changes, socially inclusive participation, and close international collaboration and mutual learning is required for the sustainable transformation to a sustainable society. Citizen science has the potential as a best practice solution for this process. The characteristics of citizen science as a mode of social self-enlightenment allows it to anchor the knowledge needed for change and to increase the public support of social transformation. To secure this in the long term, a shared framework for equal cooperation must be developed, in cooperation with other R&I stakeholders such as public authorities, businesses and industry, and research and academic institutions. The session will outline the conditions as well as future directions of this framework and address critical issues, such as the tension between autonomy and use of citizen science, the mediation between scientific independence and participatory expectations, and the benefits of an open science policy.

Format: 10-minute presentation + 10 minutes Q&A; Session organiser: Justus Henke, Sylvi Mauermeister, Claudia Göbel

What roles does citizen science in the social sciences and humanities have for working towards the SDGs? This session focuses on the organisational settings in which Citizen Social Sciences take place. We are interested in cooperation between different stakeholder groups, especially between scientific institutions and civil society. Such cooperation is important for addressing the SDGs, but how does this work in practice? Which analytical concepts are needed? By bringing together research results and experiences of practitioners, we seek to provide an empirical basis for discussing success factors and challenges for addressing the SDGs through Citizen Social Sciences.