Talking about Mapping for Change project

Louise Francis, is co-founder for the Mapping for Change project (co-owned by UCL's ExCiteS group). Mapping for Change is an innovative social enterprise that exists to support the development of sustainable communities by providing them with mapping tools.



Find out more at http://www.mappingforchange.org.uk

Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS)

Muki Haklay is a professor of geographic information science and co-director of the newly formed research group Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) at University College London



If you are interested in finding our more about ExCiteS, you can visit the project website, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites/.

Simon Tokumine is talking about Vizzuality and the Old Weather project

Simon Tokumine works for Vizzuality, a company that specialises in developing citizen cyberscience projects. One of their most successful projects is Old Weather, where citizen cyberscientists get to help meteorologists make climate model projections by transcribing and interpreting old transcripts recovered worldwide from weather observations made by Royal Navy ships during the first World War.



More information at http://vizzuality.com/ and http://www.oldweather.org/

The 'Digital Exposure of English Place Names' by Stuart Dunn

Crowdsourcing is often used to build up communities with a specific knowledge base. Stuart Dunn, a Lecturer at the Centre for e-Research in the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London, introduces a humanities project called 'Digital Exposure of English Place Names'. Stuart also informs us about a new scoping study, which hopes to provide some insights in developing a typology for crowdsourcing.



To find out more visit http://englishplacenames.cerch.kcl.ac.uk

Growing the ranks of citizen scientists - Scistarter, CERN@School

Yesterday afternoon at Citizen Cyberscience Summit, I found at how the grassroots movement is developing, and gained some insight into some of the resources and tools available. 

We heard from Darlene Cavalier, who is an advocate for science literacy, and is encouraging citizen scientists enter discussions relating to scientific policy in the US. She also started up the website www.scistarter.com to help people with no hard academic background to participate in science at a recreational level.

Scistarter offers a place to go not only for citizen scientists, but also for those interested in setting up a Citizen Science project. You can find tools for developing data collection, sorting and visualisation, as well as ideas for building communities and designing a website. Scistarter has an impressive media partner - Discover magazine. Darlene is a senior advisor to the magazine. Adding you project to the scistarter Global project finder promises to connect you to our community of doers! 

Demonstrating that you really don’t have to have in higher education to contribute to Citizen Science were A-level students, Louis Wilson and Chris Lundy (from Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Kent), who described a project that started from a school trip to CERN. CERN@School gives students an opportunity to use chips (named Medipix) from the Large Hadron Collider.  Eleven schools in the Kent area are now using these chips to gather data about secondary cosmic rays in the atmosphere, and Queen Mary University’s GridPP project is helping them to process the data. 

Chris and Louis are in the process of designing an app for smartphones (with smaller mega-chips e.g. USB stick in size) and are hoping to collaborate with application software developers at the Summit.

Science by citizens

Don't panic, organise by Martin_Duggan on Flickr

The citizen cyberscience summit brings together so many disparate activities and people, all with the basic premise that everyone should be doing science and be involved. They also have the attitude of "Don't Panic, Organise!" Well three projects which are doing this are the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS), London Zoo and EveryAware.

Shannon Dosemagen and Sara Wylie from PLOTS are interested in open source development of tools for grassroots science. They want civic science to solve the problems of engaging the community in environmental science and health research. What matters to them is that citizens are interested in different kinds of needs and data types outside usual standards. So they are trying to develop science which is community orientated and owned.

Their first project used balloons and digital cameras in 2 litre soft drink bottles to do aerial mapping/photography. It was first used in Louisiana so that actual on the ground stakeholders could get involved in tracking and monitoring the oil spill form the Deep Water Horizon disaster. They now have over 200,000 images and have also transformed all of the data into to industry standard but also created non-online data e.g. maps that were handed out at diners and shops. It has now been used for pollution monitoring at the Gowarnus Canal superfund site in Brooklyn NY as well as by protestors in Jerusalem, Wall Street and Santiago to show the extent of their movements.

Not everything is so urban though Alasdair Davies from Zoological Society of London presented the Instant Wild application. They have 6 camera traps in 4 locations like Sri Lanka, and Kenya. When they are activated by a mammal moving past them the photo is sent to a volunteers phone so they can identify what animal it was they are now upto 80,000 downloads to iPhones and over 325,00 identifications. They have had some real surprises like a fishing cat in Sri Lanka or leopards in Kenya but the most important one was a mountain mouse deer which has only been photographed once before in 3 years (before that it wasn't even officially recognised as existing). They hope to move forward with 21 new cameras and new locations as well as supporting the Android platform.

The last project was EveryAware presnted by Vittorio Loreto from La Sapienza University of Rome. It is a platform that integrates objective and subjective monitoring to improve awareness and possibly change behaviour. They combine various technologies from sensor boxes to smart phones with their flagship project being "Widenoise". Measureing actual noise (objective) and a user's prediction (subjective) it helps build up a noise map of the area but also engage the user in what the noise levels are around them


These are only 3 of the projects trying to bring people to bear on science and engage them actively in thinking about their local environment as well as the global.

Developing skills for Citizen Science: Tom Igoe

The first day of the Hackfest sparked off a great deal of discussion. Tom Igoe, is an Associate Arts Professor at Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in NYU, and runs a truly inter-disciplinary course that takes in a hundred graduate students a year from different backgrounds (dancers, musicians engineers, librarians) and trains them in communications technologies, programming, electronics, media production and app development. All useful skills for developing citizen science projects!

During the two-year graduate ‘Physical Computing’ programme,  students get truly inventive, exploring more intuitive ways of interacting with technology and computers to solve problems. A computer's physical interface is fairly limited (i.e. keyboard, mouse, interactive display), but the ITP projects delve further utilising micro controllers and sensors that respond to humans in a more intuitive way. 

One of the themes is to examine sustainable practices, and think about solving environment issues guided by students own motivations. One project, ‘Botanicals’ uses a simple temperature and humidity sensor that tweets you when your plant is sick. The group is also working to improve the work of conservationists that track monkeys in the forests. 


Digital fabrication (more customer-centric “maker” culture) can also be used for humanitarian research goals, and ITP are working alongside  UNICEF. Some projects have implications for healthcare/assistive technology. Students have designed a special balance board to help stroke victims regain their balance using micro controllers with two pressure sensors. 

Most of the tools used by students are developed at low cost and are simple to use.  Tom is also a co-founder of Arduino, the open source hardware platform for electronics prototyping platform. It’s flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

ITP Alumni often come back for Summer School for refresher courses, and some projects are transferred into a real world context. Two ex-students, a carpenter and dancer set up Groundlab, and have designed a Lion collar (with inbuilt GSM/GPS sensors) to help African farmers. When wild lions come close to a farm-yard area the collar sends an SMS to the farmer to alert them.  

Takeaways from the presentation: "A project only really makes a difference when you can see how it reflects on your own life, and others lives. It’s all about generating ideas, and it is worth being promiscuous with your own ideas. The 'things' we make are less important than the relationships they support. We can get lost in the novelty unless we remember why we are developing the 'thing' in the first place."

Citizen science, getting stuck in

Science is sometime shown as gleaming labs and shiny white coats, we all know that is not how it really is. Two talks from the second afternoon session at the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit showed how far this view can be from reality.

Lilian Pintea from the Jane Goodall Instituteis using community based monitoring in western Tanzania to protect the chimpanzee and their forest habitats. They use a holistic approach engaging and empowering communities to look after their natural resources (including chimpanzees). Based on Google's Open Data Kit they get locals to get identify and tag local landmarks. However it is not always so high tech they have pulled data from maps drawn in the sand. It is still a bottom up approach, with the team just being a catalyst and facilitator, providing tools, training and stipends.

Jon Parsons from the Global Canopy Programme is using Technology to enable non-technical people to record the natural environment. He started his work in the UK with the Woodland Trust with a project digitising  phenology (plant and animal life cycle events) datasets from as far back as 1736. They then asked for help from the public to do observations on ancient trees and the BBC programme Springwatch got involved and they had a massive uptake. They now have 75,000 catalogued and validated and almost 20,000 more. He then moved to more foreign climes, Guyana. The project uses a native community to monitor, record and verify areas and landmarks in the rainforest. It was not a normal project testing included making sure the phones could survive a dunking and mango fall! One of the stranger problems the encountered was that older members of teh community had very dried out skin so could not use the touch screen without licking their fingers first.

These are only 2 of many projects showing that citizens are not just people sitting at home analysing data on their home PCs, sometimes they are local tribes avoiding falling mangos.

e-infrastructures for Citizen Science - an EU perspective

Providing an EU perspective on the important links between citizen science and e-infrastructures, was Kirsti Ala-Mutka who is a Project Officer at the GEANT and e-Infrastructures unit of the European Commission DG Information Society and an expert in online networks and learning.

The EU provides high-speed connectivity for researchers to set up collaboration platforms, which have a global dimension. Citizen Science is helping with building this global dimension and there is great potential for collaboration. The EU wants to citizens to become much more involved, with greater global collaboration between amateur and professional scientists, to create new user communities.

Kirsti's talk provided some examples on how Citizen Scientists can work together with EU e-infrastructures:
• Data collection and infrastructure development
• Citizen Science provides a highly distributed computation resource
• Providing new ideas for developing tools and practices

...and how EU e-infrastructures can help citizen scientists:
• Persistent data storage solutions
• Remote access to specific resources and equipment
• Strategy and inter-operability support for worldwide collaboration.

Kirsti is interested in further ideas/suggestions from Citizen CyberScience Summit delegates on open access, and shared some developments:
• Open access pilot in FP7 in all e-infrastructures
• Open access publications and data infrastructure- OpenAIRE, EUDAT
• Tools and models for citizen science-Gloria, Discover the Cosmos
• Roadmap on e-infrastructures for Open Science

Questions asked during the session included: Should citizen science have specific, own programmes or be seen as part of broader e-infrastructure development activities? How important is it to have collaborations between citizen science initiatives and discipline-based “professional” research communities? How to best encourage citizen science initiatives for preparing proposals? Are there any gaps in certain areas?

So what is 'Extreme Citizen Science'?

How does EXTREME citizen science differ from the traditional Citizen Science approach?

Yesterday's final session was delivered by CCC Summit co-sponsors - University College London’s interdisciplinary ‘Extreme Citizen Science’ (ExCiteS) research group - which launched their exciting project in April last year.

ExcCiteS co-founder, Muki Haklay (professor of geographic information science), explained that extreme citizen science is about enabling any community around the globe to start a Citizen Science project that will help them deal with issues that concern them. exCiteS have been collaborating with a number of communities - from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. We'll cover more about their activities later today!

‘Extreme’ in this context means extremely collaborative science which is where a community identifies and defines their own problems, and collectively find a solution (via data collection and analysis) using adaptable scientific tools and methods. With this innovative and pro-actice approach, scientists can take full advantage of both public knowledge and creativity.

ExCiteS aims to take Citizen Science to the next level (see table below) encouraging a wider participation and providing a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their background and level of literacy.



One project, developed by ExCiteS Jerome Lewis, a UCL Lecturer in Social Anthropology is supporting conservation efforts in both the Congo and South Cameroon by supporting local forest communities to better represent themselves to outsiders. Jerome has helped the local communities describe their issues and specific problems via simple and easily translateable tools (such as maps and icons) and hand-held devices (e.g. GPS instruments).

Forest -based villagers have been able to isolate, prioritise and map out sacred resources thereby mediating conservation efforts so forestry companies can avoid destroying local resources.



Muki also outlined some of the challenges faced by extreme citizen science:
Data collection devices are now a reality, but unfortunately the marginalised and poor still remain side-lined.
Analysis tends to be dominated by scientists and we need to develop analytic tools accessible to all citizen scientists in order to realise its potential.
Methods for motivating and ensuring effective participation is crucial but those groups most in need of support are still largely excluded for example: rural, semi or non literate, and people living in vulnerable communities.

Exploring the science of citizen science

Francois Taddei gave a great talk today at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit and boiled it down to "Do we need a science of citizen science?". Based at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinary at Paris Descartes University he even changed the title of his talk at the last minute after watching the earlier talks. However he brought up some great questions that could shape the future of citizen science.

There are some important synergies between science education and technology but how can how can citizen science be brought in? The thing is both technology and science are evolving at an unimaginable rate (a mobile phone can now be a microscope). But education is only really a 19th century innovation and is evolving a lot slower. It is changing now though, children now do real science or publish papers in peer reviewed journals.

Hand in hand with this is citizen cyberscience opening science to the public, for example Foldit is in some respects a game but it solves real scientifc problems but also is being used to improve the methodology being used by teh protein folding community. What Francois wanted to know was can we do the same for science education?

The old model was the "teacher" was catalyst and moving towards contributing to the frontier of knowledge is slow, you could be doing a PhD before you get to actual do new cutting edge research. Citizen science takes anyone and everyone to the frontier. What is the next step? Sometimes projects only get the public involved in one aspect. They just donate their computer to crunch or just recognise patterns and shapes. They should get involved in all aspects; creating models, planning analysis and doing the experimentation.

He did leave us with some open questions:

• Are the best projects top down, bottom up, co-constructed
• Who benefits? Who should benefit? Science, companies, contributors society
• How can we maximise learning through research while contributing to the field of citizen science
• Can we analyse and model citizen science processes
• What would a particular discipline need to do to benefit from citizen science?
• What is the optimal division of labour between man and machine, citizen and pro individual and collective.

However, for me, it really leaves one main question "Do we need a science of citizen science?"

Citizen Science Around the World

Around the Citizen Science world in 80 minutes!

Citizen cyberscience is truly a global trend and the landscape is evolving rapidly. During the second afternoon session we heard from projects in China, Brazil, South Africa and South East Asia. Even though projects are initially set up in specific regions, they attract volunteers across the globe often tackling widespread humanitarian problems such as improving access to clean water (Computing for Clean Water), or mitigating the devastating of earthquakes (SE Quaker Catcher) and monitoring deforestation (Forest Watchers).

Wenjing Wu from the Chinese Academy of Science told us that in China, volunteer computing has grown in popularity by nearly 25% in the last year. She gave us an insight into the ‘Computing for Clean Water’ (C4CW) project which is the first Citizen Cyberscience project to be established by Chinese Scientists. The project has the support of IBM’s World Community Grid.

Clean water is one of the UN Millennium Goals. Worldwide 1.2 billon people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion have little or no sanitation, which is a big problem for China and its growing population. The ultimate goal of this research is deeper insight into how to build a new generation of cheap water filters, to alleviate the pressing demand for clean water. The physical mechanism of filters is not fully understood, and requires the insight of data from thousands of realistic computer simulations.

Earthquake safety and mitigating the devastating effects of seismic activity is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. Taiwan is located on the convergent plate boundary zone between the Eurasia and the Philippine-Sea plates. Eric Yen from the Academia Sinica, presented the SE Asia Quaker Shake - a project that aims to encourage locals (including high school students/teachers) in quake prone areas such as Taiwan to join in and monitor signs for aftershocks using sensor technology.

Deforestation is responsible for 20% of the greenhouse gases, and a major cause of global concern. The exact rate at which rainforests are presently being destroyed is not known. Daniel Lambrana Gonzalez (Citizen Cyberscience Centre) introduced a Brazilian volunteer-powered project, Forest Watchers, which is building a global network of volunteer to monitor forests across the world with limited traditional means of self-monitoring.The project asks volunteers to check for signs of deforested areas through Satellite images. Join them for a Hackfest on Saturday. Results from the project will be presented at the Rio+20 summit on global sustainability at the end of June!

Motivation, Motivation, Motivation

Estate agents will tell you that the most important thing in buying a property is location, but what about citizen science projects? Is it motivation? What is important? Also who do you know if you're doing it right? The second session at this week's London Citizen Cyberscience Summit introduced project's looking at motivation, evaluation and engagement to answer some of these questions. 

Andrea Wiggins from Syracuse University

Up first was Andrea Wiggins (@AndreaWiggins) from Syracuse University near NY (soon to be Dr Wiggins) with her talk Motivation by Design: Technologies, Experiences, and Incentives. She has looked at many projects like eBird and The Great Sunflower Project to investigate what "makes" or "breaks" a project. Her work looked at what rewards were being offered, the activities the volunteers were undertaking and evolution of the projects (both through demands from the volunteers and the science).

Her take home points were:

• If personal and scientific interests of the volunteer are satisfied by the project it is easier to attract people.
• It is important to promoting satisfaction and commitment among the participants
• Data entry is dull, but a usable interface can combat this
• Visualisation of the part played by the volunteer is, anecdotally, a motivator
• Introducing an element of gaming to the activity works very well especially on smart phones where people can engage during a short downtime for them (e.g. in a queue)
• Think about how to reward and expand the volunteers experience at the start of a project.
• You will need people to manage the project, pay for them
• Think about yous audience, align them with their interests
• Good design of the tech/usability is not optional. Doing it upfront is cheaper in the long run

Tina Philips of Cornell University

The second speaker was also based in New York but decided to give her talk slightly differently. Tina Philips from Cornell's Lab of Ornithology was unable to attend in person so she joined us via technology so as we followed her slides on the big screen her disembodied voice led us through Motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. She discussed the impact that the explosion of citizen science projects has had, with over 1,000 papers being generated for science what has it done for the public?

After looking at the existing projects it was obvious that in depth evaluation was almost non-existent. However there was strong proof that high engagement led to deeper learning. This led to the DEVISE (Developing, Validating, and Implementing Standardized Evaluation Instruments) project which aims to improve evaluation quality and capacity to help inform citizen science and and how it can be used for informal sci education. They have now built a framework of evaluating individual outcomes for any project depending on their needs and it is being field tested this year.

 Ofer Arazy, University of Alberta

The final speaker of the session was Ofer Arazy, University of Alberta. He has been looking at how citizen science compares to peer-production projects (like Wikipedia or open source software) which have been extensively studied. His team's focus was on Stardust@home but also the Citizen Weather Observer Program.  They studied the motivational drivers and their effect on the quantity and quality of contributions made by volunteers. In the open source software arena, the main driver is the creation of a product they use. This is however different to citizen science, their motivations range from the "selfish" (gaining reputation) to identification (I am part of the community). The team tried to pick apart how these effect the project. After surveying the volunteers to find motivations they correlated these with the quantity and quality of data provided by them. There were many complex relations hops but what was important was that quality and quantity were positively affected if their part of the community and contributing to something seen as worthwhile by their peers. Howveer they also saw that if the rewards on offer were based on quantity then quality suffers and vice versa.

What I really learned from this session is that while knowing what you want as a scientist is, for citizen science you need to know what "citizens" want and that is not easy.

Three types of crowdsourcing!

Increasingly the public wants to participate more actively in science, rather than be passive consumers, and the use of the Internet and the web is expanding the types of science you can be involved in.  Since the last Summit, three years ago, the Citizen Cyberscience (CC) movement has expanded rapidly, but the beauty of it is that it is still at a grassroots level.

In the first session today, we found out about the diversity of peoples’ motivations for taking part in projects, and also shared some ideas on how to build and develop a crowd-sourcing network.  

Jonathan Silvertown from the Open University shared lessons learnt from two Citizen Cyberscience case studies - Evolution Megalab (http://evolutionmegalab.org/) and iSpot (www.ispot.org.uk).

Understanding your potential volunteers' motivations for taking part are important for driving the success of any CC project, and it often involves examining the sociology of engagement. [Stay tuned for the next GridCast session, which delves more deeply into people's motivations.]

Jonathan described three different types of crowd-sourcing. The first type involves the collective wisdom of others- where everyone's opinion is equally weighted.  The second model is where knowledge is weighted according to expertise and the third is a synergistic combination of the two.  

iSpot is an example of a synergistic model. It's an innovative online educational tool to help natural history enthusiasts  identify species in their own back garden. Over the last three years, iSpot has already helped with the discovery of 2000 new species with just over 100,000 individual observations. 

When people initially join the iSpot network they may be an expert in their own field but often have limited knowledge in other areas (birds, mammals etc.).  iSpot provides a supportive environment which helps contributors build their knowledge, and is proving to be a successful model for building a synergistic social network. Contributors have dual roles as a beginner/expert, which provides a great basis for learning. People can even become multi-specialists with time, and building their reputation within the online community can be a big motivating factor.

2nd Citizen CyberScience Summit kicks off tomorrow!

For the rest of the week, GridCast will be blogging from the Second Citizen Cyberscience Summit. 

The three-day event brings together volunteers and scientists from a wide range of Web-based science projects, ranging from volunteer computing (SETI@home, ClimatePrediction.net) to volunteer thinking (GalaxyZoo, Herbaria@home) to volunteer sensing (EpiCollect, NoiseTube) and much more. Above all it was a chance for some of the millions of volunteers who make citizen cyberscience so successful to tell their story.

The Second London Citizen Cyberscience Summit promises to be just as pioneering in its scope, and even more innovative in its format! The full programme is available on the CCC website, http://cybersciencesummit.org/

If you are at the event, we'd love to here your thoughts on the different projects. If you are interested in blogging for us please email us at info@e-sciencetalk.org