 workshop organized by open air and AOI on university approaches to citizen science in a transition to open science where we'll talk about institutional opportunities and challenges for creating an open and inclusive environment for research. Before we start quickly some housekeeping rules so you're all participants unless you speak you're muted and your video is turned off unfortunately because we have a lot of participants. If you have any questions or comments about the presentations or the topics addressed please use the Q&A box so there is a special Q&A box for questions. This way we can keep track of the questions and all questions will be answered at Q&A time after the presentations. If you have any technical issues or just want to say hello you can of course use the chat box. This session is being recorded recordings and slides will be made available through YouTube and Zenodo. We'll also upload them on our event page on book and air and you will be sent a follow-up email once they are available. So today we focus on citizen science as an enabler of open science. As you can see we have a full program and without further ado I would like to give the road to Pastora to give an introduction on this session. Thank you. Thank you Emily. Thank you all for being there. Yesterday we had more than 200 participants. I hope you are all there this morning with us. It's a pleasure for me to welcome you back to this joint workshop between the EUA and Open Air on citizen science. As Emily mentioned yesterday we had a very interesting first session with a specific focus on citizen science at universities. We went from a general overview given by Professor Muki Haklei from UCL to a very interesting discussion about opportunities and challenges of citizen science for and at the universities. And today we want to go beyond the university, beyond the institution itself and to open the debate to a bigger scope. We'll talk about ecosystems and how they can foster citizen science practices and the relation with open science as well. And for that our first panel is focused on citizen science at the scale of the city. We've chosen the city of Barcelona. Maybe you wonder why Barcelona? So first of all because of its research ecosystem with eight universities in the city and also several research centers it has also other agents that are involved in the daily life of the research in the city such as hospitals, museums, schools, companies, citizens associations and also the public administration. And in that sense we can say that the science has been integrated as part of the culture of the city for around 20 years now. And secondly because there's a solid background on citizen science initiatives in Barcelona. Many research groups are working on citizen science projects and there's also a very interesting entity which is the Barcelona Citizen Science Office. That office was created by the City Council in 2012 with the mission of supporting citizen science in Barcelona by advising and promoting projects as well as developing actions and bringing citizens and research closer together. And for this session today I'm very pleased to have with me a very good representation of this Barcelona Citizen Science ecosystem and let me introduce you the three panelists. Josep Perelló, he's an associate professor in the Department of Fundamental Physics at the University of Barcelona. His research group focuses on citizen participation and artistic practices as an alternative way of doing science and in quoting himself. For four years he was the head of the science department at Arsanta Mónica which is a cultural center for digital media in Barcelona and he also worked with the Barcelona City Council in the creation of that citizen science office I mentioned before. Then we have Isabel Riedmallén. She is a senior researcher at the laboratory of urban transformation and global change at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Huerta de Catalunya, the Open University of Catalonia. Isabel has a background in environmental science research and a proven ability to work across disciplines and with participatory research approaches in multicultural contexts. And last but not least we have also Diana Escobar. Diana is responsible of the citizen science office here in Barcelona and of the science and innovation program at the Institute of Cultural Barcelona of the Barcelona City Council. She has a background in biology, museology and heritage management and Diana has developed her professional activity in cultural projects in the public administration such as the launching of the first zoological sound library in Spain. And since 2008 she has been leading different projects on citizens and technologies dissemination and cultural innovation through citizens participation. So thank you very much to the three of you for being here today with us. To start the session I'm going to ask you to give us a brief overview of your work and specifically of what of the one that's related with citizen science and also the city. So Yusep, the floor is yours if you want to start. Thanks a lot. Thank you. So yes thank you very much for this presentation Pastora. And my idea was to briefly, shortly explain you and show you some of the projects that we have been doing but also providing some context because I think that the context in these cases is very important. So I think that now you should be able to see my screen I guess, right? So the idea basically is that I want to briefly explain you a bit about some back doors or the backstage in open systems which is our research group which is small but we like to be small and I think that also in the terms of citizen science especially in just moving and going a little bit beyond to the to the context of for instance of the city. So the idea is also to work in a multi-disciplining way. So in the case there in that case means that we are not attached to any specific topic and we are not attached to any specific methodology maybe but what is more important is to address to some social concerns that are and that has some collectives or some specific groups that are really worried about. So the idea is more trying to move forward in terms of multi-disciplinarity or trans-disciplinarity in this way. So and not to run the projects alone but also to do that with other actors that are also present in the city context. So in this sense so I can just briefly explain you a little bit our experience in this sense but I would like to start also with a notion that is just also a bit wider than the notion of participation. I think that also citizen science if we go to the city, if we go to a specific context we need to talk about cooperation. So we don't need to or we don't have to work specifically in the sense that we are there, we are the experts and we go there and we are going to explore that field. Instead we need to work together with the experts in the field that are already living in the city. So this means maybe policymakers, this might mean specific collective or many other actors that are already present in the city context. So at that level so maybe as academics maybe we are not the only experts. Okay so there are many other experts or at least there are many other experiences that are very valuable. Okay so I think that this is a very interesting. You said sorry for interrupting you but we have seen your presentation as I think it's a speaker view and not the presentation mode but we are seeing the two slides. Okay yeah let me sorry. No it's fine. Let's try now. Thank you. Thank you I didn't click one very important button. So as I said so the idea is to move forward to this idea of participation and also to insist that being a researcher being being or coming from a university we need to think in terms of cooperation. So there are many other actors that can actively contribute to the contents and to the value of the research you know. So just to move forward I want just to share some small projects like the ones here. So this is one single project that was also started in a very different context than an academic context. So this was part of an exhibition in a cultural center here in Barcelona that was working in climate and with other several institutions that you can see the logos below. So we just found that there was a key issue that it was not deeply explored enough and we need the action of many other actors to make that possible. So in the sense that we were wanting to know better which are the NO2 concentration levels in Barcelona because they have regular explorations in this sense the academic explorations only cover only 300 points and here we were able to cover 700 and 800 points for instance. So and to make that possible we did that with the schools. Okay so we went to schools and we invite families to come out to their own schools and to run together and at the same time a kind of exploration of their own neighborhood and locate the specific spots where they really care about the NO2 concentration level. So this is the kind of approach that we like very much in that sense. I'm not going to to the scientific part of it but I think that it is very important to understand that that is not only a scientific endeavor so it's something that also participants also expect that something can change based on the information and the data that we can collectively gather. So just moving forward to another one and just pastora stop me when my time is finished but let me see if I'm able to switch. Yes so also we like very much to talk about public space. So what I mean by public space. So a public space is a place that also can be understood as a lab but we prefer to talk about research in the wild so let's move forward about this idea of constraining and restricting reality in the labs but also going to the public space and better adapt our in real conditions some specific experiments like the one here which is a behavioral experiment for instance on on on climate action. So that that's also a very important idea from my perspective. The idea is that the research needs to be also be reconsidered when you just move and you just go out from your your your own university. Also for instance in the case that you can see here we were also worried about the violences in public space and and we did that with a theater company and also with a design school and also with a group that we were able to identify which were the key issues about gender gender perspective in gender perspective and violences in public space no and how to do that. So first of all to define together the research that for sure no but also is also to understand also for instance play spaces like the science pianali that maybe Diana will explain later is that that that big festival a public festival that this can be also a showcase to to really make possible this kind of research and to go to the city and to do that in a much more natural way no so in this case was this kind of studies and we were wanting to create the situation and also to study the reaction of people and their specific stories that were created specifically to this context. So another another very important point is is and related to open science is also okay so we have results we can keep the results in the academy yeah that's a possibility and we should do that but also we need to also come back to some public spaces and explain the results of a specific experiments no so in that case for instance it was a question that was posed by a group of young people in in hospital ed and they were just wanting to answer this general question how would you react if you wake up one day and there is no water when you open no you're just a go to the shower for instance no so in a way or another so this was also related to a research that can has its rigor but also they were wanting also to express publicly the results no and we also take the opportunity to take a to make a to make a partnership with a library to also to find spaces to express the results in public space no so to beautifully explain what is the result of this joint research okay another possibility and I will finish here is also to explore mobility yeah so there are many applications that are also able enable us to to use for instance google no and to take data from google from twitter or from many other places to study mobility but also being a scientist also believe that it is also very interesting to also study mobility in a specific conditions how to do that okay so to invite a specific collective to study mobility in their own neighborhood okay so as researchers here the challenge is to enable that to coordinate that and also to find the right partners to make that possible no so and to define finally together the the research question that we were wanting to to explore no so this is one example that also this is a poster that was created by a school and also they already identified very important difficulties to also to reach their own school because there is a big wall which is a big railway station and also with there and they are not able to cross that the big barrier that you can see here and they were also trying to explore other possibilities than some of them that were not legal indeed no so so also we should also understand that also is mobility might be an issue and we are very interested in as scientists but also we need to also understand that all the participants like the persons that consciously participate in the in the experiment for instance in that case also they take some back home message and also be able to identify some difficulties in their own neighborhood and to be able to go to the municipality and say look there is a problem these people wants to go there and they don't have an easy path to do that no so so these are more or less the big challenges that I think that we have here in in front in in our table when we talk about citizen science and in cities in a city context and I think that Barcelona here it has been also for us very productive in that sense but I would like also to insist that it could not be possible without the collaboration and the participation of many other actors out of the university space no so so otherwise that big effort could be simply impossible I would stop here thank you very much you said thank you very much and now we move on to Isabel Isabel the floor is yours thank you pastora thanks for the invitation to to participate in this roundtable I completely share many of the thoughts that Josep has shared with us briefly I will explain you the the context of my work I'm as pastora said I'm working at the urban transformation and global change laboratory at the University of Catalonia that it's called Turbala we are a collective of researchers from from different backgrounds from environmental sciences like me but also economy geography humanities and we are interested in in investigating the interlinkages between a variety of processes actions and flows that produce and transform the cities we live in and we have three research lines one of them I believe in one of them that is about co-creation and I'm particularly interested in examining the processes of collaborative production of knowledge in both digital and non-digital contexts with a focus on transformation and social innovation so citizen science is a key part of this research line but also related practices like science and sustainability education activities at schools we are also exploring grassroots initiatives on climate resilience and adaptation in the informal learning context within the city of Barcelona the participation of citizens informal decision-making processes related to the climate emergency also in Barcelona and as I said other citizen science initiatives and processes both in and outside schools and in the particular case of citizen science we are less we can we are less interested in exploring the mainstream approaches in which citizens are invited to contribute to the scientific research projects that are designed by professional researchers and in which they often and are engaged as data collectors because well these kind of projects have been have been widely explored and their benefits in terms of win-win solutions have been also widely documented instead we are more interesting in analyzing what we call transformative learning initiatives in which the aim is to co-produce the research project with the researchers and other societal actors and the output it's not so much focus on the scientific data but on building critical and reflective thinking capacities among the citizens to provide them with a meaningful voice in the scientific practice so I'd like to share with you and one of these the projects that we have been evaluating um that was uh conducted in a secondary school in Mullins de Rey that is a city located in the metropolitan area of Barcelona this project was led by a French association called La Tellier des Jues Avenies within uh and the Nouveau Commodity of Science program that is a French the French our French government program of the Ministry of Science there and in this project in Mullins well it started because there were three students that participated in a video contest and asked the following question in the video how do the colors of the walls of the school influence educational performance one of the the members of this association saw the video at internet and contact the school because they thought that it was a very interesting question and they found that the question was a result of the students concern about the poor conditions of the school buildings and also because they perceived that the students uh were not so enthusiastic about their classes so they asked themselves maybe it's about it's because the colors of the walls are gray or white no why when we were at the primary school all the walls were painted with red and other uh no living colors so the mediator of this association guided these and other students that were interested in in the topic in uh in conducting in articulating their questions and invited to neuroscience from a university who were specializing in the study of attention behavior so together these students and the researchers designed this research project that they call investigating how colors influence learning they were able to review and discuss previous experiments on the topic and they designed their their own experiments based on that evidence they conducted their experiments at the school with their peers they analyzed their data of course always in collaboration with the researchers and reflect on the results so such collaborative process resulted in in students improve self-confidence and collaboration skills and also they understood how science is done in terms of its ambiguity its normativity the uncertainty the frustration the complexity that are part of the scientific process and that are necessary to achieve accurate research results and these views are about science we we documented how this the students use about science change from seeing science as a as a normative issue no from a from an exploration a process of exploration but um not only the students change their frames of reference references regarding science also the researchers involved in the project and this is i think the key result no for this in terms of this this workshop the scientists at the researchers involved at the beginning were very hesitant in terms of participating in the project because of the time that they had to invest in in the project and the returns for their academic career and at the end they become they became like advocates of this approach convinced that it can continue to produce more socially relevant research so they got a lot of inspiration from the discussions with the students they detected gaps in their fields of research and give space no to to explore new ones so i would like to finish by highlighting that the key potential of such co-produce approach to citizen science that some scholars call civic science is high and can contribute and strengthen the research of the universities and also the research of research centers and it's highly linked to the open science approach that is now being promoted thank you thank you very much isabel thank you isabel and joseph for those two nice examples of research groups working with citizens and other stakeholders as you mentioned having also the city as a doctor of the science and the research performed i will pass now the floor to diana scobar who to know a bit more how the basalona city council is is promoting citizen science diana return thank you good morning everyone and thank you very much pastora for inviting the office to to to share our experience as you mentioned it is an office that is fostered and supported by the institute of culture of the city council since 2012 and as you all already mentioned joseph was in the in the beginning and he could explain a little bit more about the the start process of the of the office just to say that the the office is supported by the public administration and in terms of the city council but as as it started it started because there were five science city projects that were very involved in in fostering citizen science in the city and they created at that moment community of practice from that five projects there were some of the settle in a university three of five and they were a good starting point to present the initiative to the directorate of creativity and innovation at that moment at the culture institute who of course was involved in some innovation culture and different strategies so the citizen science office seemed at that moment that was a really a strategic program for the directorate since then and it is 2012 we have been growing and from this five initial and still they are still there in the office projects we are now 20 different projects around 20 different projects now from that 20 different projects eight of them are directly led by different universities research group but some others need and has to work with with universities also with the different research groups at universities from that 20 different projects there are so many variety of topics and and research fields some of them are carried out by also by by research centers also by universities as I mentioned but also by social entities that's it's a it's a really bit new in in in that last phase some of them are funded by the EU sorry and some of them have expanded beyond their their local scale we as as an office didn't carry out the projects the projects are carried out by their the researchers or the entities or whoever is is leading it but we try to to connect our mission is to connect research with citizens because I think and we have a lot of times of discussion of it with joseph for example citizens are everywhere but are nowhere so the difficulty is really to to to to get closer to to citizen and I think from the public administration perspective that should be our our role yeah just connecting and and facilitating all all the processes so that means that the office is really open to to society in broad sense though bro both research groups and civil organization and local bodies if they are interested in neighborhood associations also we we think we this 20 projects and and all the all the agents involved create a really powerful and diverse community and in terms of action was what we do is supporting advising and developing pilot projects that's especially relevant when new projects are are evolving that's the the moment now we also try to connect the projects with new audiences and we help them to disseminate and we do it in in in both senses one sense is mediating this mediation role between civil association entities with the researchers and also facilitating the participation in major city events as as you said mentioned before the biennial for example city city and science is one one of the examples or the science festival the annual science festival of the city also and these these are like you know places where you with with sorry where projects can explain what they do and but also to explain the results they have been gathering for a for a for a period of time another thing we do is to search alliances with other local agents and that that is thanks to to sorry a little bit to a networking a permanent networking with different agents of the city that the that means civic and cultural centers network the education community or public libraries but also with some municipal areas like the balsana open data office the ecology urban planning and mobility department and the balsana city city health agency we also try to foster mutual learning because as a community and it was at the start of the at the beginning of the of the office it was a very very powerful thing all this experience of the project this is really a big knowledge capital so it is very interesting that they can go get together and exchange what they are doing because i think the experience is was one of the biggest issues to to to to to to to share that also we of all of all of these we have we organized two different transfer programs or cross-cutting programs what is citizens at schools we organize it with the local education authority and for example in this year instead the kovai kovid situation there are a different research projects working with two or three school groups each in a 15 hour schedule on different topics and there are from different approaches and what we want to do with this program is to seek and raise awareness among teachers and students and make them reflect about the importance of playing an active role and having critical spirit in relation to specific challenges and consequently being able to taking action getting involved we have also another program that citizens science in the neighborhood in which different residents in different areas of the city carry out research projects some of them were shown by by joseph before there are many others and all the projects that want to participate in our programs has to subscribe the office 10 principles of practice and it is expected whether it is an university research group or a social entity that the project search or social impact and solutions to improve people's quality of life it it doesn't matter what is the field of of of working as a result we have been a large part of the districts of the city and we have involved more or more or less 13 000 local residents school children until now what have we learned well that along this year some projects have approached the office and in terms of uh referencing the feeling in the city but not not just the researchers came to to to the office there were um and and more in in in the in the last years it's more common that some social entities have contacted the office with specific concerns and demands that should be investigated in order to provide scientific evidence for policymakers that is a big issue in terms of being a public administration it's a guy the case for example for a civic organization that wanted to monitor biodiversity in a green area in their neighborhood that was submitted to urban re-planning and and more recently there is a neighborhood association uh concerned with the sound and noise impact in public spaces that originated a new project that's basana sound map for example but there is also uh challenges um I think the the big one is real uh real citizen long-term engagement and it's particularly difficult with there are projects that are monitoring in long term uh or long day to say serious for example um it's not just a pop-up activity and in that cases there are other cases that are really very good in in this in terms of uh just uh focusing uh during a a concrete space of time but for those other projects that there is really uh not so easy to to to assure the uh citizens engagement and participation and for me the other challenge is to foster real changes or solutions applying uh to citizens or communities concerns and demands because if the project is raising uh scientific evidence uh you presented to the policymakers but there is no action uh after uh that will be generated frustration and I think I leave it here and if there are questions we can go further thank you thank you very much Diana thank you very much for this approach that we are not so used you know to having this overview from the policymakers um and thank you the three for for these different close ideas now so we have 10 more minutes for for questions and there are some different questions um in the chat uh don't be shy if you have any other questions uh um please go ahead and and I will ask the the panelists but let me start um because yesterday we were discussing about the challenges and Diana now you are ending with some challenges from the point of view of the of the city council yesterday we were discussing about the challenges um at the institutional level at the university level um and you were pointing out some different ideas how to solve them uh but I want to ask you if you have any recommendation any specific recommendation in order to promote citizens science whether in your institutions or or at the city level and and related to that um Sofia if and to also ask for some good practices uh for attracting citizens attention and the connection uh between them and the research projects want to start you said yeah um yeah so I'm just I was just reading the questions as well so you know so yeah so I think that uh it is important that that that we we just uh go deeper in this sort of collaboration I just to have another consideration for instance with the covid crisis no so we have managed to work together the very different entities and unholding uncertainty in many spaces no so I think that for citizen science that's a really nice kind of way of thinking how we can move forward no so first of all maybe institutions or policymakers must live more in in this context of uncertainty okay and on the other side so being scientists also we must be much more adaptive and much more worried about the social impact no so these are the kind of connections that I think that we have on the table and that's the big challenge in my opinion no so so I want to leave the space to Isabella in the end about that I would say that this is perhaps the most important thing thank you yeah I completely agree that we should open more spaces for conversation dialogue to strengthen this collaboration I think that we we need to change the focus from from from this unidirectional view no from reset the research centers or universities is to the society but also open the other channel and and create this mutual learning process that also Diana was referring to so we can also listen what citizens are asking or what what are they the what are their concerns their needs that they usually are managing through associations at the neighborhood level or other kind of organization so creating these spaces for dialogue starting with the with the dialogue instead of thinking only on providing from the research centers projects in which they can engage in no I think that this is also one of the the ways to thank you so well well good questions let me tell you briefly an experience here in Barcelona and it and it has to do with the impact of of citizen science of what citizen science could or can do in in in a community we have in Barcelona well not we but it's a research center who's working on microplastics in the in the in the beach of course it is a as a local program but it's a global program because they are working in in in a in a planetary scale well as we started with a project in in in the in the neighborhood beside the the beach that's La Barceloneta of course they just were already working there with schools but the difference was when we went there and tried to implement these citizen science of the neighborhoods program it was one of the first projects we we we put there in the in the neighborhood that there was a Joseph also there at that moment and what we made at the moment was to involve more agents of the of the neighborhood in that project not just the research center and the and the schools that were already working there but all other agents Barcelona is a very special neighborhood with a with a strong social and community approach you know so the the result is that because we were there and we tried to start to work with the city civic center or cultural center in in the in the neighborhood the cultural center made a call to so many different social agents in the city and I'm talking about the scuba divers the artisans the the the fishermen for example you know and because they wanted to incorporate the project that is micro watching micro plastics watching to to the real life of the of the of the neighborhood as a result they constitute a board that is called plastic zero that mean plastic as you are in in in catalan and each main festival or activity in the in the neighborhood they went there and they put their banners with the micro plastic project there and they they turned the the project in in a in a in a community moto you know I think it's a it's a big effect on as as maybe does this you said also talked about the the water project that means it's involving the community and not just in in research doing that is just a part of the of the thing but in changing the the way of approaching a concern or a problem or whatever thank you diana as we have just two minutes left let me just combine three of the questions that are uh related to the three different actors we we we have here citizens researchers and and policymakers so um I will ask you the these three questions combined into one and I will ask you for your short brief answer so on the one hand Katia Ecorova asks how do we would how do we deal with the expectations of the citizens engage in these projects also the videos in that uh ask how much citizen science also contributes to the education of the researchers and last but not least um it's just let me rena camacho asks also how do we engage the policymakers uh to within this as citizen science ecosystem so you said do you start yeah so our approach here is not to start the project alone is that simple as that no so for instance if you are talking about learning because you're working with the schools so you need to have the schools there because they also need to see the potential of participating in these kinds of projects no it's not because you are just selling them a very cool nice material for running inside the school you know so it's something more sophisticated they would say no and uh and they must see a benefit inside their curricula no so otherwise it's not maybe not that useful no and on the other side I would say also that and we are already exploring this in a project that is called co-act is that we are we are building a kind of a let's say a knowledge coalition which are a set of entities that are have the potential to transform the results into a specific policies or in specific actions no that are also already inside the project at the beginning okay so that's very important no to have them not to wait until the results you have on the table but also to when you design the research itself you must include at least to keep a dialogue with them no so that's really important no and we like also to talk about a lot in terms of participants of co-researchers so they must be feeling that that they are part of this endeavor otherwise it's just uh they will just provide data which I think that that they will be happy to do it once but not twice thank you very much you chef Isabel what about this education of the researcher itself doing this type of research in a different way uh yeah well as I said in the in the example with the example I showed uh the researchers participating in the project changed completely completely their frameworks of references regarding how to do research I think that these kind of projects on citizen science just the connection of the collaboration that they can establish with the citizens whoever they are students or neighbors or other actors is a is an added value because as you know in many disciplines the scientists and the researchers are used to to work inside the universities or research centers with a few opportunities to engage with society and of course science is made through the curiosity and through the through creativity so engaging and collaborating with the citizens is a source of creativity that of course with will improve the the research process and also the the way of understanding science so there is there is impact and there is there are there is academic evidence on on that already published thank you very much Isabel so Diana the question from the political uh policymakers how do we engage them how whether we can create other citizens and science offices in other cities in euro what do you think that's that's a big question and for for our side it is because I think um we are a neutral or we are supposed to be a neutral agent because uh we are in the in the we are the someone said someone like we are the the home of everyone yeah but of course it is very difficult to involve policymakers in terms of to be the the part of the the problem and try to be part of the solution so in in terms of being part of the solution you have to recognize you are part of the problem and sometimes it is not so easy so I would really like to to know uh best practices in in in this terms but I think the the crucial thing is when when as as both Giuseppe and Isabel said you have to involve a citizen in the in the in the beginning or more more strong it should be the beginning in the citizens that is the the case of of Barcelona sound map for example so the citizens participants were just concerned with noise and there's a problem and we have to go to the policymakers and all of them are changing also their approach and it's just not a problem but it is it is a heritage a sound heritage for them also now and they're discovering in terms of of sound dimension their their their spaces no so thank you very much and my friend we should leave it here this very interesting discussion thank you very much Giuseppe Isabel Diana for being today with us and I pass the the pro to to Emily thank you hello thank you very much for this wonderful panel very interesting and perhaps if Giuseppe Diana Isabel Pastora have a minute or you could have a look at some unanswered questions in in q&a and answers them and there was also a question in a chat from Ilias about the impact of COVID-19 how can you do citizen science in times of pandemic so everyone panelists and also attendees please if if you have any recipes how to to do citizen science in times of pandemic please write in a chat and moving on with our program our second session for today is a open air session and it's about citizen science enabling open science open air schools project term and we have Eugenia Kepriotis from Ilina Germanic Gogi and Andreniki Pavlidu from Atina Research Center will share with us the experiences with open science schools projects so over to you Eugenia and Andreniki. Hello from us too I will now start sharing my screen for our presentation do you see now yes okay great so thank you Irina thank you for this opportunity to to show what we have done my name is Eugenia Kepriotis from Athens Greece I'm working for the RND department of EA or as Irina very well pronounced Elina Germanic Gogi this is a big private school in Athens Greece and in the framework of open air we have undertaken the task of the citizen science activities we have created a very concrete strategy of developing and implementing the citizen science activities in school environments cooperating with teachers and students and we have come up with three major activities the first one is the school seismograph network where we gather seismic data from several seismographs that we have installed in in schools in Europe the second one is the open schools journal for open science this is a scientific journal following the the processes of a proper scientific journal but it hosts it publishes articles written by students and is also addressed to students and last the bringing a Nobel Prize physics to the classroom where we give access to data from big research centers in Europe to students and teachers nonetheless all these three activities have been very closely cooperated with opener infrastructures Androniki yes so all the things that you will hear in this session they connect with open air and how is this performed so you have we have a new journal so all new articles are assigned with a doi so the information for each article and the journal is indexed on open air through the provide product and then you have the complete metadata collection like the title the authors the date the data they use the outcomes the results available through the open air research graph on the no-do open air explore so you can really find them very easily you can just search all these also includes that we we of course respect the fair principles so students get to know all this process from scratch from start all the way to to having something public with their name so this is very very important for us and for them exactly thank you Androniki so let's break down these three initiatives to to see the real content so the first one is the school seismograph network or as we like to call it the seismic data journey what we're doing here is that we have installed 61 seismographs in schools in Europe we have placed a focus on the eastern Mediterranean part which is actually the the area most prone to earthquakes in Europe our network extends from Israel to Azores including not only areas with active seismic activity but also with volcanic activity therefore you see there are Azores and also some seismographs in Greek islands like Sandorini or Nisiros that they are very popular for their seismic activity how is this happening so we either the researchers they are either express the interest for a specific location or a teacher who is interested in the field of seismology makes a request for the installation of seismograph in their schools we then in cooperation with the researchers working on this activity explore the the the importance of this area and we decide whether it will be beneficial for the network to install their seismograph once this this is approved we install the seismographs ourselves in this school in the specific school we connected with a computer which feeds the researchers with seismic data 24 7 at the same time there is a feed for citizens 24 7 if someone wants to have as a citizen a very brief idea of what is happening they can visit the network and they can get a visualization of the waveforms happening at any date they choose but what the the the researchers are getting is their raw data and this raw data is in suck files this is a format that it's not easily redouble or editable by normal computers as the ones we are using and here is where opener is coming again yes yes thank you so what we thought is okay let's make it easy for people and for students of course and teachers to use that information that data so we used a national infrastructure that we have here in Greece that is in progress which is named helix it's the alienic data service where you can host data and further more with the lab product service that it offers you can run code you can they have a server you can run a code you can upload a python script for example and use it over your data and get outcomes and you get it real and live so it's very very important now so we managed somehow to make to simplify the process to make it more convenient so what is this process all about so as Evgenia said you have the raspberries you have the hardware that gives you the suck files and then we use helix we create an account of course it is approved and you start a server in helix environment and you as I said upload the python script and you run jupiter notebooks which is very very familiar all over the community and you get your graphs your seismic activity insights everything so if I want to conclude everything we start from schools teachers students as citizens in our in our case we continue with providing the tools from a national infrastructure from a well-known software and then we upload the information and we'll make it public available on Zenodo and of course on all open-air services great thank you androniki as a matter of fact back in october 2019 before the covid crisis we have organized here in greece a hotwig an event where we have asked from teachers and students to cooperate in order to develop an early warning application using python programming language what we have provided them with was the data from five big earthquakes that have taken place in greece from three different seismic stations seismographs in order again to facilitate them we have transferred these these types the suck files into types that could be easily readable from computers that one can find in avert school computer labs and that made their life much easier so let's move to the second initiative that of the journal when we were working on our strategy of introducing citizen science in in schools we realized that there was a part missing when students were were seeing themselves as scientists and what that was the part of publishing their work and therefore we have developed a journal the open schools journal for open science this is an international scientific journal from students to students as i said in this journal they can provide they can publish the work they have implemented the research work they have implemented in class via school projects the journal so far over the last couple of years has been quite popular and we are happy to say that we have 241 active registered users 141 of them are authors that have provided content and 100 of them are scientists and professors that are are working as reviewers for the journal so far we have published 13 issues with 244 articles scientific articles from students and posters additionally using again the open air infrastructures all these articles can also be found on a community on Zenodo following all the metadata that Androniki mentioned earlier in order to make them more accessible and easily traceable and moving to the last initiative is the Nobel Prize physics on Zenodo so what we have done in this initiative is that we have taken advantage of the outreach programs of big centers in Europe like the Virgo experiment or the experiment the experiments going on on cern and we have developed educational content using these data that can be used in class by teachers and students by publishing this content on Zenodo we can have an easily access to the views and the downloads of each material having an insight of how much and which of these are used in classroom in real classroom conditions as I said we have developed a strategy from the very beginning in order to select and to develop these initiatives and we were very happy when we've seen how welcome all these activities have been from students and teachers how eager they were in every step in the step to have access to data in the step of analyzing the data in the step of publishing their outcomes but what did come as a surprise for all of us working in these tasks was a good practice example last year there was a new discovery that was published in our journal and that was a discovery of an exoplanet a team from a Greek school in Athens you can see their names on the top part of the slide they have actually made a discovery a discovery of an exoplanet that was whose characteristics was analyzed for the very first time in our journal so imagine the impact of such an action on the lives and on the confidence of these students how close they feel to the real research happening and what an impact it will also have to them if you think that these students these school students will be the next generation of scientists and the future responsible citizens that we want them to believe in the evidence-based opinion so before leaving we would like to we would like you to remember that citizen science and education does have an impact a strong effect because it helps students firstly to get familiarized with science and the open science fair principles and rules and procedures as Andronike from the very beginning explained it helps the mapping of the university and the research environment into school environments so we see the bridges built there we see the students engaging in scientific reasoning which in the long run will save them as responsible citizens we see that we can spark students interest and the understanding of the scientific content and knowledge and last but not least we expose the students to the use of the tools and the language of science in their lives not only when implementing these activities but in their lives as a whole thank you very very much I hope we were on time are there any questions for Andronike or myself thanks a lot Evgenia and Andronike thank you I don't see any questions but they say Valentina's hand is up so I'll let Valentina talk and hope she'll ask a question and you'll have to unmute yourself Valentina okay so maybe it was by mistake so then please if you have questions or types I mean a Q&A and Evgenia and Andronike will be happy to collaborate with your school initiatives and this journal is open to everyone and articles could be published in any language so that's really cool for collaborations and moving on to our last part of the program when you registered for this workshop we asked to identify whether you would like to give a lightning talk and we receive many more requests that we could handle so we could invite just four five short five minutes talks sir and we posted summaries of other interesting citizen science experiences on the workshop page here so our first speaker today is Katrina Zuro and she will share with us academia permitting societies through citizen science use cases of engagement in higher education so over to you Katrina hello good morning from Greece to Greece within an international approach very warm thank you to EUA and to OpenAir for organizing this today webinar thank you very much for the invitation and for giving us even a very short slot it is enough for us so I'm Katrina Zuru head of web to learn services company in Greece and participant in an EU funded project INOS INOS is about the integration of open and citizen science into active learning approaches in higher education it's a consortium of five universities and a company and Liber the the network of academic libraries in Europe the scope of INOS is to modernize higher education curricula through open open and citizen science and to upskill higher education academic and library staff and students through the engagement in citizen science practices there is a range of activities within this European funded project I will only emphasize one which is a study we conducted and which is now publicly available on academia permitting society through citizen science use cases of engagement in higher education we wanted to analyze the position of universities in open and citizen science and with respect to open knowledge and innovation so basically we asked the following questions the first is how universities currently perform in citizen science activities which is the untapped potential there where I mean where there is opportunity for more involvement and which are the ways universities can cater to the needs of citizen participation in science for societies this open access study has been conducted on this very the outline of the methodology I will describe quickly now we screened more than 100 activities this to do this we have adopted a typology I go through this very quickly we we had dimensions of the typology such as the type of activity borrowed by the societies typology the role of university staff the format of the citizen science activity the open access degree the citizen science approach the ethical and legal considerations we identified 65 cases relevant to this typology and we saw case 20 of them this analysis led us to the release of recommendations for higher education institutions in the form of action actionable guidelines because one of the concerns of university's partners of finance but also in general is okay now what how could we move on with the analysis done so we identified guidelines in in in the form of what to do action points with the aim to raise awareness in citizen enhanced open science we want to call it like that citizen enhanced open science because we very much believe as well as you into the connection the combination of open and citizen science with the ultimate goal to better connect academia to society and these recommendations that we released we offered them in the shape of infographics to make them more catchy if i'm allowed to use this term to teaching library staff that wasn't fully aware of the citizen science umbrella activities so that was my talk you're kindly invited to have a look at Innos project and in more importantly getting touch with us we'll be very delighted to engage with you this is a range of activities of Innos and thank you very much for your time thanks a lot Katerina our next speaker today here is Luis Alberto Nunes from Universidad industrial do Santander so from Greece to Colombia and over to you Luis and it's very early in the morning for Luis so thanks a lot for joining us so that's okay that's okay thanks a lot for the for the invitation okay I will I will show you an experience that we have been working on for the last six years and I'm talking on behalf of the conga physics this is an Erasmus project for us we are a group of students mainly pre graduate students from Universidad industrial do Santander and this is a group of outreach an astronomer club which is becoming an astro particular research group under my guidance where we we are in the eastern part of Colombia in the middle of the mountain one of the branch of the aim and this that comes into into Colombia across Colombia and then goes into Venezuela we are a public departmental university around 2020 thousand pre graduate studies and a thousand of that weight and this is what we've been working for a while with we call racimo racimo is the acronym of monitoring I mean net I forgot okay that the citizen network for monitoring the environment particularly environmental variables and particularly there we have been working devising the the station and in the middle of this set of projects which is the starting racimo funded by frida which is a regional fund and then we develop within the city the the project to measure the the quality of air and then we make a startup to to guarantee the sustainability of this project and now we are working on the rural area of of Bucaramanga and the next year we are going to move and we are going to to be working with the Erasmus project called la ponga planting this experience in eight uh any institution in four latin american countries uh the first uh was moving from cosmic ray to weather station because we use a weather station within our detector in the the cosmic ray detector and uh we made this uh initiative and we work with five uh schools within the city and we train nine teachers and 48 students doing a citizen side project we then move to racimo air and we involve not only our university but also the private company and we serve to the mayor of Bucaramanga and another city which is close to Bucaramanga and also to the environmental authority which is the area of Bucaramanga then we move we rise awareness to the schools and teachers and we got a professional low cost weather station a software platform and also an startup uh then we move our experience to astroparamo astroparamo is this idea to use astrobiology and climate change physics to convince ourselves that the earth is not a very special place in our galaxy the idea we have a joint project with uh uh the montaner university much looked with matzwellian university mentioned and they have this wonderful program we adapt that project to have this science club within the rural part of Bucaramanga in the covid crisis we have to we cannot be there uh and we have to use uh wasab and podcast to guide our student to use not only the the kit to understand the climate change effect but also these uh uh weather station that now we have there and uh finally we are moving this is our platform next year in the program laconga is an erasmus master program in physics with 11 university two in france one in um germany two in peru two in ecuador two in colombian two in venezuela and we have designed some uh citizen science activity uh within the program and then the idea to use our student to do uh to adopt one of each school in the in each country and to replicate our experience that we have here in bocaramanga in those countries and that's it thanks a lot thanks a lot louise very interesting and a reminder that if you have any questions please write them in a q&a and louise will answer them and i think the first question in q&a is to andrenik and uh ifgenia whether any school could be involved but maybe louise you can also answer whether any school could be involved and we're moving from colombia to belgium to gantt but we're still on the weather topic and we'll have uh steven uh calvarts sir from gantt university talking about flinder flamish weather citizen science project thanks a lot for the for the invitation so i'm steve calvarts uh i'm a meteorologist and i'm working at gantt university and i'm also affiliated with royal meteorological institute of belgium and i'm very happy to bring you uh the story of the flinder project which is a project investigating observational meteorological gaps with schools and actually this citizen science project started from a scientific need we as meteorologists as climate scientists we needed data data from very diverse environments and today we have a lot of meteorological data but they are all coming from rural environments and we also need information from cities from lakes from forests and that was missing and this information is needed um in the context of climate adaptation where we know that we should understand very well the uh interaction between land use land cover and the atmosphere for example the urban heat island effect is very important and we also need this data for a second reason we have always more stronger computers for our weather forecast so we are today able to run weather forecasts very high resolutions resolutions with very detailed um physics schemes so we are able to make more local weather forecasts but this also means that we need more local data more local observations to evaluate these forecasts so there was a strong scientific need for this data but as a scientific team it's very hard to set up this kind of big networks in very diverse environments so at the beginning of 2019 we decided to um to try to tackle this this challenge in a citizen science way so in january 2019 we launched a call towards schools and we asked them to propose interesting measurement locations in their neighborhood and the response from schools in belgium was overwhelming so we received more than 400 proposals from schools and we selected the 60 best locations so the 60 most interesting locations from the scientific point of view were selected and at these locations schools and teachers and students they have built and installed professional weather stations and you see some some images of these uh installments over here but of course at that point the collaboration with schools did not finish so we collect a lot of data and the schools are using these data in their curriculum they are investing they are doing research with with the data of the of the weather stations and they are also following up the measurements so if there is a problem with one of the weather stations it's it's a school who goes to the station and tries to solve the problem so since december 2019 our network is operational we have 60 weather stations in very diverse landscapes so at this slide you can see a screenshot of the dashboard so there is an online dashboard you can follow up all the data in real time so this is available to to to anyone and there is also an API so that it's very easy to extract the data and to use the data for different applications um and i selected on this on this screenshot i selected some station uh some stations just to show you how diverse the locations are because that was our scientific need so there is a station in the city center of brussels one in the middle of a lake one in the middle of a forest and so on so it's really a unique network and uh for us scientists this was really a missing piece of information in in belgium and i would like to spend also one slide on what i consider as one of the main challenges in citizen science and that's how to create a sustainable project how to have a project that can that can continue because for example in our situation we got funding the school's would like to continue we would like to continue so that's that's a very important challenge how to how to do this and um actually we solved this by gathering many partners and building a big consortium consisting of cities of companies and they are all supporting this project and in this way we will continue our citizen science project our measurements together with with schools and these partners they will also use all the data and i would like to finish with four take home messages so i think first of all citizen science really creates novel scientific possibilities we built a network that would have been completely out of reach without the help of citizen scientists in our case mainly schools so that's very important schools are also very interested a very enthusiastic partner for this kind of projects the fact that we have real-time open data creates a lot of new opportunities and makes it much easier to continue with this project because there are other users and other people interested and i think and that's a very important point one should not underestimate the capacity that you need if you want to manage such a project because it's not only science we are used to scientific project but in this kind of citizen science project there is really a lot of work that should be done on the educational material that you develop for schools on the communication that you have with all your stakeholders and the schools so it's really it's it's challenging but it's worth the effort i would say for your for listening to my talk thanks a lot steven excellent and now we're moving to check republic to the city of bruno and uh Yirgimarek from masarik university will talk about citizen and city science as next steps for open science over to you Yirgim thank you very much uh thank you very much i will share my screen just a moment please can you see it yes yeah perfect so i prepared thank you very much for the invitation i'm really glad that i can be here and i prepared a short presentation about basically i would say that it's kind of follow-up of my of the previous speaker you know when we are in the Czech Republic we are now in the in the process that we are really stabilizing these open science strategies for universities and also at national level you know so we are basically we don't have so many infrastructure already built but we have a lot of people that wants to build it finally you know so that's that's creates an opportunity to do it also kind of innovatively you know and that's the goal that i would like to present today so the goals of the presentation is why to do citizen and city science and why is the future of open science in our personal opinion if i can say and then show bernard use case how we are trying to create a system to work together with another stakeholders so just short introduction this is my city where i was born it's it's bernard this is our cathedral and we are also kind of we are small we are big city to make innovation but small city to to actually manage innovation i would say and there is a deep cooperation also in popularization of science this is for example our uh bernard observatory and planetarium to give you some some ideas what bernard is we have approximately 400 000 inhabitants 29 district that's funny actually if there is someone from london you know london has 35 districts so we about london is enormously bigger than than bernard we have many students we are the student city of the check republic we have six public universities we have a strategy for attracting talents bernard region and south moravian innovation center for 15 years basically or more than 15 years focus on innovation for for businesses academy etc and important sectors are space industry and game industry and electron microscopy we are one fourth or one third of a global production of electron microscopy is from bernard then back to my university as i mentioned we have six big public universities in bernard our university is massac university that has 10 faculties 30 000 students many phd students etc and what's important now back to the topic of open science we have 10 faculties one core team that that consists of five persons that are dealing with the topic of open science we have 33 open science contact persons already from the start of the this year 2020 and we have 14 open science advisors that consist from a manager top managers of university and also top scientists from the university so this enabled us to build a new strategy that should be in place from 2022 and the main topics are open access and fair data but but and that's important that these advisors said hey if we are building it here now basically in 2020 we should include also citizen science city science etc you know so this is this is important thing that is going on actually today at one o'clock we are presenting with my colleague we are presenting to these advisors what we have come with in practice i would say and i will show you this in a moment so the basic question was why to do that actually why why to think about citizen science as important block of the of open science and basically a little bit about just one thing is that there are a lot of universities a lot of students and the city of bernau has also its own city no scientific public scientific officer i would say you know so it's dedicated person that is communicated with the universities about the topics that the universities are have the problems or about sharing the research you know with the public sector so from that from the discussion came this kind of picture that you have the scientist line and you have the public officer line and there is also the private sector but this is not important for this kind of discussion for now so as you can see there are two things you know you are with opening science or you are making them for the commercial purposes you know and if you put the open science as a i would say enable as an infrastructure you know for sharing communicating and selling research in future so they in in this context we think that citizen science is important step you know in one of these branches and it's important step also for the cities and policy officers to do so-called science diplomacy for example that is what i know it's very important also for the city of Barcelona so this is the bruno use case that we are trying to build basically in these days and we think about it in this way on the left you can see open science and universities where you have these research things and scientists etc on the other hand you have citizens science citizens basically that can be used for helping researchers but there is a huge gap you know between that at least at at shaker republic we got always questions yeah i would like to work with the citizens you know on some structured way but we are not able to do that you know or we have struggles to communicate with the citizens you know and we think here in in bernard or at least from the point of our strategy that the enable burner and stabilizer for that is the city actually you know that we have to have a cooperation with the city to really enable our scientists to ask scientific questions to citizens and work with them and back citizen scientists or citizens interested in science ask questions you know to the scientist you should do research maybe there you know i find it interesting yes no etc you know so basically create as mentioned here the knowledge transfer through the city you know this is the whole idea about that and that in general they think that this is the smart cooperation that we are trying to build and this is not just a scheme i would say but we have a very useful tool for that that was built by the public administration and it can be used for these practices you know and this is called bernard id as you can see there's an important number here you know that already 166,000 people from the city of bernard or or that are for example students that are visiting the city uh they already have this account you know so basically the big question of these days that we are that we are going to talk with the city officials is to create a scientific module of this service you know where you have this number of already participants you know and to enable through this service the communication between the research you know and citizens you know and this is the goal of coming months i would say that hopefully in 2021 we will have a we will have a real i would say connection there is already on the technical level you know and there is already a cooperation between one of our institute of masaiq university with the city of bernard there is a cooperation that city of bernard is paying 100,000 euros you know it's a budgetary framework for asking this institute about the exposition research you know ideas for development of the strategy of the city of bernard this is already done it's from 2018 so based on this exhibit a example so it's we are trying to stabilize it in the into the environment so just disclaimer this is nothing that is set already this is just an idea that we are developing but we are getting positive feedback from the part of the municipality office and also from the from the part of government of our university so basically we are in the in the in the situation that it's all prepared you know the systems already work the systems already exist you know and now just connect them together that's that's what's going to be about the 2021 for us so with that i leave you and thank you for your attention and it would be very nice to be able to talk with you about your experience in hand in in belgium in in london as mentioned yesterday etc and yeah so thank you for the possibility to be here and looking forward for the discussion thanks a lot jorji and good luck with your initiatives and we are coming to the close of this meeting and what you said i guess was one of the reasons why we wanted to have this meeting to share experiences and learn from each other and i'm handing over to ingar for final words yes it has been it has been two interesting days yesterday and today and we have heard quite some things about citizen science the different kind of citizen science and that technology is of course a big driver for citizen science because it's technologically easier to to engage citizens that way so not only is citizen science getting momentum and research even in education citizen science claims its seat even courses are set up masters degrees as being set up as we have heard yesterday and but however it's only a minority of researchers at this moment that include or even consider citizen science as a path in their research projects some have some cold feet to do that you have to be able to give a bit away of the control you have as a researcher on your project you have to believe in a participatory design of your project as you have heard throughout the two days you have heard a lot about opportunities and challenges so quite some opportunities just to name a few engage students already at the early stage in universities engage students of in schools very nice examples here today but also for universities to involve your alumni to strengthen the bond of alumni with their alma mater this is also stressed throughout the days and of course to engage with local communities university is embedded in a society in a local community that they can they can engage with but of course we mustn't be blind of the challenges that we have heard one is about context about more technological things like infrastructures or legal barriers that citizen science projects face think about privacy think about think about copyright issues also there is the appreciation of citizen science in in research projects how is it rewarded evaluate just appreciate it just an appreciation even with a small budget to do a project and there is a question of including citizen science and universities as strategic context so these are a few things to we have to work with for the future but of course citizen science is also about social relevance we have different examples of how these citizen science projects involve citizens show them that research is not something normative but this is a process that people are involved in where you doubt where you create new ideas and where you talk to each other and there is collaboration and it showed in also today that the involvement of the city the city council as an enabler as an mediator as and getting involved in this project is certainly a surplus a quite a good thing to to enable all these kind of projects and a very important you need an exchange in these projects not one directional we want this from you and that's it kind of thing so there's a lot of opportunities some challenges to tackle we heard like with the examples of open air how open science can enable citizen science with data management infrastructure communication channels skills and training needs can be can be tackled within an open science context again here we hear some challenges about sustainability which is a really a crucial question of course like many projects some of these projects are limited in time and then it stops and how do you keep schools engaged how do you keep citizens engaged so a lot of interesting stuff over the last two days that we heard now we will follow up on this of course within the open air community with open science we work together with citizen science project see how infrastructures can support what they what they do in a ua context for example ua has provided policy input on the new european research area this was just renewed by the european commission and the ua member states where they continue to build a common european research and innovation landscape with a broader vision for the new european research area with deepening existing priorities and objectives and their ua has provided policy input as i said but including the needs to support incentives incentivize and reward citizen science so ua calls on the commission and the member states to work with universities and provide the necessary support and develop adequate incentives and rewards so certainly to sum up this is a very interesting evolution in research that we see in the last 20 30 years even began in the 80s as we heard yesterday so a lot of follow up for us for every one of us i hope you enjoyed these two days that you have seen quite some opportunities to work with and thank you for joining us these two days we will send you a follow-up mail with links to the recordings to the presentations and the feedback form we'd be very happy if you could give us some feedback on these two days we will write a blog about it so i hope you keep tuned and that you follow up on the citizen science projects that you heard of today thanks a lot again for your cooperation and hope to see you in next time goodbye