'Extreme' Citizen Science - ExCiteS

Citizen Science - the participation of amateurs, volunteers and enthusiasts in scientific projects - is not new, given activities such as the Christmas Bird Watch or the British Trust for Ornithology Survey, in which volunteers observe birds and report to a national repository. Such projects date back to the early 20th century, and many of the temperature records used in climate modelling today have been collected by amateur enthusiasts operating their own weather stations. Over the past decade, Web 2.0 technologies have led to the proliferation of Citizen Science activities, from SETI@Home, where people volunteer their unused computer processing power, to Galaxy Zoo, where amateur astronomers suggest interpretations of images from the Hubble telescope, to the Pepys Estate in Deptford, London, where residents carried out community noise monitoring for six weeks to challenge the activities of a local scrapyard operator. However, the current range of Citizen Science projects is limited in several respects. First, in most instances the participants are trusted only as passive participants (by donating CPU cycles), or as active participants, but limited to basic observation and data collection. They do not participate in problem definition or in the scientific analysis itself. Second, there is an implicit assumption that participants will have a relatively advanced level of education. Third, and largely because of the educational requirements, Citizen Science occurs mostly in affluent places, and therefore most of the places that are critical for encouraging biodiversity conservation, and where population growth is most rapid, are effectively excluded. This proposal challenges this current mode of Citizen Science by suggesting the establishment of an interdisciplinary research group that will focus on 'Extreme' Citizen Science (ExCiteS). ExCiteS is extreme in three ways: first, it aims to develop the theories and methodologies to allow any community to start a Citizen Science project that will deal with the issues that concern them - from biodiversity to food production; second, it will provide a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their level of literacy, to collect, analyse and act on information by using established scientific methods; finally, it aims to use the methodologies of Citizen Science around the globe, by developing a technology, through collaborative activities, that can involve communities from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. The underlying technology is aimed to be universal and to provide the foundations for many other projects and activities. The technology that will be developed will rely on spatial and geographical representations of information. The reason for focusing on this mode of representation is that, as a form of human communication, geographical representations predate text, and are likely to be accessible by many people with limited reading and technology literacy.ExCiteS has the transformative potential to deal with some of the major sustainability challenges involved in using science and Information and Communication Technologies in a hot (due to climate change), flat (due to globalisation) and crowded (due to population increase) world, by creating tools that will help communities understand their environment as it changes, and manage it by using scientific modelling and management methods. The proposal focuses not only on the development of ExCiteS as a practice, but, significantly, on developing a fundamental understanding of Citizen Science by studying the motivation of participants and their incentives, identifying patterns of data collection, and dealing with the uncertainty and validity of data collected in this way.

The proposed research is speculative by nature, and the impact outcomes that are listed here will materialise both through the activities of the ExCiteS research group during the funding period, and through follow-up studies and research projects that will emerge from the ideas generated by the group. Through careful dissemination activities, the proposed research can have a significant impact in the areas of technology development, public engagement in engineering and science projects, and by enhancing the abilities of the public sector and civic society in dealing with sustainability challenges. Finally, there is also a significant potential for commercialisation. In technological development, the research will lead to new core technology that can be applied in many contexts. The demands for this core technology to implement 'universal usability' (Shneiderman, 2000) and the use of inexpensive computing and sensors, mean that it will be a suitable platform for many practical projects that will provide an engineering solution to some urgent challenges, such as replacing the network of expensive noise monitoring stations around an airport with citizens monitoring by using their mobile phones, or supporting precision agriculture by non-literate farmers. Another important contribution of the proposed activities is the development of new knowledge and the generation of new research ideas about Citizen Science and its applications. This will foster new links within and outside academia, which will lead to the creation of new knowledge and, in the long run, to new procedures, processes and tools. The research will contribute to knowledge transfer and interaction between researchers and marginalised communities in the process of shaping research activities. The importance of developing such a methodology is that it can be used in dealing with other socio-technical challenges where such engagement is required. Increased engagement can also lead to a higher level of participation in decision-making processes, with wider societal implications. The research will contribute to the techniques that can be used by civic society organisations (such as local organisations and environmental NGOs) in gathering environmental evidence through scientific methods. Such evidence can be used to change behaviour, or lead to local decision-making and actions to change local conditions. Knowledge transfer between the academic disciplines that are involved in the research and practitioners and communities is integrated through dissemination activities. These will include electronic means such as websites, blogs, and short videos; and also through face-to-face activities, such as an annual Citizen Science gathering. Further activities will be developed through UCL's Public Engagement Unit. Further knowledge transfer and the commercialisation of the core technological platform, or a package that includes sensors, software and visualisation devices, will be considered towards the end of the grant, in years 4 and 5. We will also work closely with technology companies to increase the use of the 'Extreme' Citizen Science platform across the world. In addition to these relatively traditional means of dissemination, the methodologies and techniques that will be developed will be disseminated by 'Mapping for Change', a social enterprise owned jointly by UCL and the charity London 21 Sustainability Network, which was created to transfer such knowledge to other third-sector organisations, civic society and the public sector. The research group will contribute to the development of skills, by training early career researchers in cross-disciplinary research, and in the use of 'Extreme' Citizen Science to solve real-world problems. It is anticipated that this knowledge will profoundly influence the directions of their future careers.