Co-created Citizen Science: How, When and Why?

There is growing interest in the potential and opportunities of more participatory approaches to citizen science, such as co-created citizen science. And despite very few examples of co-created citizen science in the literature, and the citizen science community’s acknowledgement that evaluation of citizen science outcomes is underrepresented in practice, co-created citizen science is discussed as being able to achieve a whole variety of social and scientific outcomes. In addition, most reporting of citizen science in the literature includes very sparse discussion of the actual process of engagement, so across all approaches it is very difficult for the readership of the literature to replicate engagement processes, thereby restricting our ability to share and develop best practice.

This workshop therefore aims to catalyse a critical discussion about the use of a co-created process as a tool for citizen science, asking the community as a whole to discuss and deliberate on what role we expect a co-created approach to citizen science to take, what the process should look like if it is to achieve a diverse range of scientific and social outcomes, and under what circumstances is a co-created approach the right approach to take.

The workshop will adopt participatory and deliberative methods of engagement, to build a collective consensus on the ‘how, when and why’ for adopting a co-created citizen science approach, with the intention of publishing the workshop’s findings to the wider citizen science community, after the conference.