The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) is a membership and networking organisation for practitioners and researchers of
citizen science
Citizen science (CS) (similar to community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is scientific research conducted with participation from the public (who are sometimes re ...
in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
. ECSA was founded in 2014 in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
and is ruled as a charitable and member-based professional organisation.
History
ECSA was launched in 2013.
ECSA has a board of directors, elected by its members, and a collection of professional working groups that establish standards, identify best practices, help to focus research and technology, and explore the ethics of citizen science. In addition, it has an advisory board and a steering committee, which support the executive board.
Activities
It has held general assemblies each year since 2014, at which ECSA members and working groups present their projects and initiatives, and discuss how the organization’s vision can be further developed.
The first biannual international ECSA conference was held in Berlin in May 2016.
ECSA has initiated several strategic capacity-building programmes at the European and national scale, which have led to the development of outputs such as the Socientize Green and White Papers on Citizen Science in Europe and the Greenpaper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany. The European White Paper provided the basis for several actions and policies related to public engagement in science directed by the European Commission, such as the "Science with and for Society" programme 2018-2020.
ECSA is an active consortium member in several projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020. These include:
* Distributed Network for Odour Sensing, Empowerment and Sustainability (D-NOSES).
* Doing It Together Science (DITOs).
(This project has now ended).
* EU-Citizen.Science - Sharing, Initiating, and Learning Citizen Science in Europe.
* LandSense - Urban Landscape Dynamics.
* Panelfit - Participatory Approaches to a New Ethical and Legal Framework for ICT.
* WeObserve - An Ecosystem of Citizen Observatories for Environmental Monitoring.
*iTechExplorers - Collation & Sharing of Data Related to Affects of Technology on Circadian Rhythms.
ECSA ten principles
To complement the definition of
citizen science
Citizen science (CS) (similar to community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is scientific research conducted with participation from the public (who are sometimes re ...
, ECSA also developed ''Ten Principles of Citizen Science'', which have been translated into numerous European languages and have been published as a chapter in the open access book ''Citizen Science - Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy''.
See also
List of citizen science projects
Citizen science projects are activities sponsored by a wide variety of organizations so non-scientists can meaningfully contribute to scientific research. Activities vary widely from transcribing old ship logbooks to digitize the data as part of ...
References
External links
European Citizen Science Association
Citizen science
Scientific organizations based in Europe
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