Webinar: Policy Perspectives in Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing

Citizen science and crowdsourcing enable the public to make meaningful contributions to scientific and engineering research and monitoring. These approaches also produce accurate data to inform a wide range of management and public policy issues while encouraging civic partnerships with government at all levels: (1) through local scale activities, as demonstrated through drinking water quality monitoring in Flint, Michigan; (2) through national or supranational scale activities, as revealed in the National Telecommunications & Information Administration’s National Broadband Map; and, (3) through local-to global scale activities, including the inclusion of participatory monitoring and management in international biodiversity assessments. Conversely, the impact of citizen science on public policy is often constrained by legal, policy, and institutional barriers, which consider issues including privacy, liability, physical and intellectual property, data quality assurance (or “fitness for use”), and organizational cultural change, among others. This webinar will feature presentations that explore the ways in which citizen science and crowdsourcing may inform management and public policy, or that examine the legal, policy, and organizational challenges to conducting citizen science, including strategies for improving bureaucratic processes to increase the impact of these participatory approaches on public sector policies and practices.

Speakers:
Reanna Putnum, Community Engagement Specialist, Citizen Science Association
Dr. Lea Shanley, Editor for CSTP Special Issue on Policy Perspectives; Senior Fellow, Nelson Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Steering Committee, CSA Law and Policy Working Group
Dr. Alison Parker (Moderator), Editor for CSTP Special Issue on Policy Perspectives; Program Associate, Wilson Center; and Steering Committee, CSA Law and Policy Working Group
Claudia Göbel, Ris research associate at the Institute of Higher Education Research at University of Halle-Wittenberg (HoF), guest researcher at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany, and project manager for H2020 Project “Doing-it-Together-Science (DITOs)”
Presentation: How Does Citizen Science “Do” Governance? Reflections from the DITOs Project
Susanne Hecker, research associate at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ within the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Presentation: How Does Policy Conceptualise Citizen Science? A qualitative Content Analysis of International Policy Documents
Dr. Aletta Bonn (Discussant), Editor for CSTP Special Issue on Policy Perspectives