Trip Report: Dagstuhl Seminar on Citizen Science
A month ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Dagstuhl Seminar Citizen Science: Design and Engagement. Dagstuhl is really a wonderful place. This was my fifth time there. You can get an impression of the atmosphere from the report I wrote about my first trip there. I have primarily been to Dagstuhl for technical topics in the area of data provenance and semantic data management as well as for conversations about open science/research communication.
This seminar was a great chance for me to learn more about citizen science and discuss its intersection with the practice of open science. There was a great group of people there covering the gamut from creators of citizen science platforms to crowd-sourcing researchers. 
As usual with Dagstuhl seminars, it’s less about presentations and more about the conversations. There will be a report documenting the outcome and hopefully a paper describing the common thoughts of the participants. Neal Reeves took vast amounts of notes so I’m sure that this will be a good report :-). Here’s a whiteboard we had full of input:
Thus, instead of trying to relay what we came up with (you’ll have to wait for the report), I’ll just pull out some of my own brief highlights.
Background on Citizen Science
There were a lot of good pointers on where to start understand current thinking around citizen science. First, two tutorials from the seminar:
- Citizen Science as New Way to Do Science – Marisa Ponti
- Citizen Science as a Social Machine – Elena Simperl
What do citizen science projects look like:
- Wiggins, A., & Crowston, K. (2014). Surveying the citizen science landscape. First Monday, 20(1). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i1.5520
Example projects:
How should citizen science be pursued:
And a Book:
Open Science & Citizen Science
Claudia Göbel gave an excellent talk about the overlap of citizen science and open science. First, she gave an important reminder that science in particular in the 1700s was done as public demonstrations walking us through the example painting below. 
She then looked at the overlap between citizen science and open science. Summarized below:
A follow-on discussion at the with some of the seminar participants led to input for a whitepaper that is being developed through the ECSA on Citizen & Open Science for Europe. Check out the preliminary draft. I look forward to seeing the outcome.
Questioning Assumptions
One thing that I left the seminar thinking about was was the need to question my own (and my field’s) assumptions. This was really inspired by talking to Chris Welty and reflecting on his work with Lora Aroyo on the issues in human annotation and the construction of gold sets. Some assumptions to question:
- What qualifications you need to have to be considered a scientist.
- Interoperability is a good thing to pursue.
- Openness is a worthy pursuit.
- We can safely assume a lack of dynamics in computational systems.
- That human performance is good performance.
- …
Indeed, in Marissa Ponti she pointed to the example below and highlighted some of the potential ramifications of what each of these (what at first blush are positive) citizen science projects could lead to. 
That being said, the ability to rapidly engage more people in the science system seems to be a good thing indeed. An an assumption I’m happy to hold.
Random
- What’s going on with Open Street Maps
- A very fun way to test what you learned at the seminar
- +10 to the organizers – good job!
Think Links 