ESCAPE - The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 824064.
October
28,
2021
The Second ESCAPE Citizen Science Workshop was convened over 3 days between the 17th and 19th September 2020 with the joint objectives declared in the ESCAPE description of work for WP6:
“Facilitating science community engagement in citizen science, disseminating best crowdsourcing practices, and prototyping of mass participation experiments”
The workshop built on the success of the First ESCAPE Citizen Science Workshop and specifically invited participation from scientists outside ESCAPE within the wider EOSC-Future community. The event was successfully promoted on the social media channels of both ESCAPE and EOSC-Future (e.g. 1963 impressions on the ESCAPE Twitter, assisted by retweets from EOSC-Future). The timing of the workshop was slightly later than originally planned in the Description of Work, owing to the pandemic.
The workshop was convened virtually because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. It engaged 46 attendees from within the ESCAPE project partners, the EOSC Clusters and the wider scientific community. This is quite a large audience for a workshop on this topic, and it exceeds the attendance of the first ESCAPE citizen science workshops and of both the previous ASTERICS citizen science workshops (see e.g. https://www.asterics2020.eu/event/first-citizen-science-workshop and https://www.asterics2020.eu/event/second-asterics-citizen-science-workshop). The ESCAPE INDICO platform was used for management of attendees and collation of presentation materials (https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/24676/).
The workshop featured a three-part programme, beginning on the first day with talks by seven invited speakers showcasing previously successful citizen science projects. The talks were followed a tutorial demonstrating how to quickly build citizen science projects and best practices for basic usage of the Zooniverse citizen science platform. Recordings of the presentations and the tutorial will soon be posted on the ESCAPE YouTube channel.
The second and third days of the workshop were devoted to prototyping new citizen science projects using the Zooniverse platform with help and practical advice from experts within ESCAPE and the wider Zooniverse team. As a result, two new citizen science projects are now in development.
