Citizen Science Workshops @AU 2023
Support and facilitation are key elements to promote and implement Citizen Science and public engagement (citizens and citizens’ associations) in science and technology at research performing organisations.
What is citizen science and why should you care
Citizen science is the art of involving the public in scientific research in order to gather more data than otherwise possible for a research project. For research and researchers, citizen science can help achieve collective impact and bring about meaningful change in society. Citizen science brings with it many advantages to its participants, such as:
- Achieving participation and engagement in research
- Facilitating research on a bigger scale and tapping into new sources of information, knowledge and perspectives
- Accelerate adoption and implementation of scientifically proven approaches and methods with end users outside the universities
- Contributing to learning, skill development, scientific understanding, science awareness and enjoyment
- Enhancing societal trust in science and aligning scientific agendas with societal challenges
In line with the strong push from European funders for multi-actor approaches, co-creation, citizen scienceand open-innovation ecosystems are currently favoured terms and methodologies, and they are here to stay. Examples include the Living Labs for improved Soil Health in the Soil Mission, and the coming Cluster 6 call opening early 2024, but is also important in projects dealing with biodiversity, climate or food production. Early experience, however, show that this way of working requires a new approach in the way of thinking and working for many researchers.
Therefore, AU Citizen Science has developed a range of citizen science training materials and offer citizen science training workshops for researchers and research performing organisations' admin and management teams in four European countries as part of the TIME4CS project.
The first workshop in early October focused on Citizen Science Research & Methodology and provided participants with a basic understanding of Citizen Science, as part of Open Science (OS) in order for them to be able to develop and plan research projects that employ CS and OS methodologies.
Building on this, AU Citizen Science will continue to educate the scientific staff and offers workshops at AU (Preben Hornung Stuen, Bldg. 1422 / 132, Fredrik Nielsens Vej 2-4, 8000 Aarhus C) this autumn, all 2-4 PM. You can find more information and register here.