Are you planning to attend the Citizen Science Association’s Conference and/or the American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference and Family Science Days in San Jose, CA?
Let’s meet up!
Here’s where you will find SciStarter: All events are at the San Jose Convention Center.
Citizen Science Association Conference
2/11 11:50am The Crowd & The Cloud – Using Broadcast and Social Media to Advance and Support Citizen Science
Abstract: A November 2013 workshop on “New Visions in Citizen Science” at the Wilson Center concluded with a series of recommendations as to next steps, including (1) raising the visibility and impact of citizen science (CS); (2) broadening participation and lowering barriers to entry; and (3) developing and deploying training materials, including “success stories.” THE CROWD & THE CLOUD project (C&C), supported by NSF, is an ambitious transmedia initiative addressing each of those challenges. C&C includes 4 hour-long public television programs to air in Fall 2016, innovative social media resources, including a custom-designed 2nd screen app to help turn “viewers into do-ers,” and external evaluation to address the questions, “How, where, when, why and with whom can media, both broadcast and online, generate greater and deeper involvement in citizen science?” This session addresses conference Themes 1, 2 and 4 and invites creative collaboration by attendees in C&C’s work relatively early in project development.
Panelists will include C&C PI, Geoff Haines-Stiles (moderator), former NASA Chief Scientist, Waleed Abdalati, now director of CIRES, UC Boulder and host of the TV specials (on Big Science and the democratization of research), Darlene Cavalier, founder, Science Cheerleader and SciStarter (on maximizing awareness of innovative CS projects), Raj Pandya, Program Director of AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange (on engaging underserved communities in CS) and Alexis de Belloy, Entrepreneur in Residence, Skoll Global Threats Fund, on SGTF’s support of participatory surveillance and “crowd-sourcing” for public health initiatives such as “Flu Near You.” This diverse panel will discuss C&C’s assumptions about how media—old and new—can mobilize broader awareness of, and greater participation in, CS by the public, and acceptance by professional researchers. It will present planned program content and invite feedback and new ideas, and the audience will even have a chance to boo or cheer episode working titles!
4:10 pm Aligning Next Generation Science Standards to Citizen Science
Abstract: The proposed session will feature several citizen science projects that have taken steps to bring their projects into the K-12 classrooms by aligning with the Next Generation Science Standards to make use of data that students can use to construct explanations and design solutions, engage in argument from evidence, and obtain, evaluate and communicate information.
Presenter/Panelists include (1) Andrew Collins with School of Ants, a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, (2) Leanora Shell with Your Wild Life and the Students Discover Project from North Carolina (NC) State University and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, (3) Kristian Breton from the New York Academy of Sciences who is working with the Education team to design and build an online platform where youth can share and explore Citizen Science projects, (4) Sandra Henderson with NEON’s Project Budburst, a climate change focused citizen science program for educators, and (5) Jennifer Fee, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdSleuth K-12 program, which engages students in schoolyard investigations and citizen-science projects. Moderated by Darlene Cavalier, Founder of SciStarter.
After a series of short talks, the speaker/panelists will solicit input from the community on how to use citizen science data in the classroom and gather citizen science from classrooms. Questions could focus on data mining, suitable research questions, available data sets, and analysis tools, as well as how best to engage teachers and students in the research. The feedback from participants in this session could help determine the direction and emphasis for the next phase of citizen science in education with respect to NGSS, including how to scale this for the 850 projects in SciStarter’s project finder.
2/11 5:30 pm Poster Session
Leveraging SciStarter to grow and sustain your citizen science project. Case Study: Project MERCCURI
Abstract: SciStarter is more than a searchable index of over 900 citizen science projects worldwide. Project leaders can work with SciStarter to promote their projects and recruit participants. In the workshop, we’ll cover the basics of SciStarter’s multi-media campaigns with Discover Magazine, Public Library of Science, WHYY and the National Science Teachers Association; highlight partnerships with broad and diverse audiences including national sports, culture, and hacker communities; and lead a brief “how to” session to implement free, open SciStarter APIs and other tools designed to make it easier for project owners to recruit, retain, and learn about participants, find and partner up with complementary projects, align NGSS with projects, and capitalize on opportunities to share and leverage existing citizen science data and participants, worldwide.
David Coil, coPI on Project MERCCURI, from the Eisen Lab at UC Davis, will kick off the workshop with a talk about this citizen science project to compare microbes on Earth and in space (citizen-collected samples are currently orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station!). He’ll provide updates on the findings, share successes and challenges, illuminate how working together with complementary communities (including SciStarter and Science Cheerleader) helped advance the field of microbiome research and share a glimpse into the future of citizen microbiome research.
2/11 5:30 – 8:30 pm Hackfest: Creating Interoperability Between Projects, Communities, and Data
(There’s still time to sign up for this event!)
Abstract: This hackfest will build upon lessons learned during a similar event at the Citizen Cyber Science conference in London in February, 2014 (organized by SciStarter, and NYU with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation). This hands-on hackfest is designed to be a collaborative working session to explore and design ways to create helpful connections between citizen science communities.
Participants and project owners face barriers: Multiple types of logins for many different projects or platforms coupled with an inability to track contributions across projects/platforms, are two examples.
This hackfest aims to tap the collective wisdom of San Jose’s programmers, designers, artists, program managers and others to design and create new or repurposed tools to help more people get involved in and track their contributions to citizen science projects AND to explore ways projects can share data, volunteers, tools and other resources to rise the tide of citizen science and enable better cross-platform analytics for project leaders while improving the experience for participants.
Daniel Arbuckle (lead developer, SciStarter); Steve Gano (director of product development, SciStarter); Arvind Suresh (managing editor, SciStarter) Greg Newman (CitSci.org); Russell Neches (UC Davis/Eisen Lab); Caren Cooper (North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences)
2/14 and 2/15 Join SciStarter, Discover Magazine, Astronomy Magazine and the Science Cheerleaders at Family Science Days (a free event presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science):
Read more about this event, here.
2/15 10 am – 11:30 Room LL21D (San Jose Convention Center) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference (paid registration required)
Citizen Science: Advancing Innovations for Science, Information, and Engagement
Abstract: Citizen science is now an established practice for scientific research and public engagement. However, the field is still maturing and ripe with innovation in areas such as image analysis, gaming, do-it-yourself science, large-scale data collection, visualizations, communications, and applications in public health, disaster response, and conservation. Moreover, the ability to engage directly with the public in research is changing the way we think about information — how we gather and work with it, who has access to and ownership of it, and how to collaborate to address social and scientific problems. A two-day pre-conference event at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting will gather practitioners from across scientific disciplines and from around the world to share innovations in citizen science practice and theory. The event also marks the first meeting of the Citizen Science Association, a new organization that unites and serves this rapidly growing community of practice. In this session, representatives of the Citizen Science Association and architects of the field of citizen science will share major themes from the citizen science pre-conference, highlight exciting innovations that have impacts across disciplines, and provide a vision for citizen science as a growing field of research and practice.
Organizer:
Jennifer Shirk, Cornell University
Co-Organizer:
Meg Domroese, Citizen Science Association/Schoodic Institute
Moderator:
Jennifer Shirk, Cornell University
Discussant:
Meg Domroese, Citizen Science Association/Schoodic Institute
Speakers:
Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, Acadia National Park and Schoodic Education and Research Center
Facilitating Growth, Innovation, and Positive Outcomes in Citizen Science
Richard Bonney, Cornell University
Citizen Science: Organizing Information and Inquiries for Impact
Darlene Cavalier, SciStarter
Connecting Communities To Rise the Citizen Science Tide
