Since the last edition of the EU-Citizen.Science newsletter, focused on inclusion in citizen science, our world has been affected by one of the most serious health crises of the 21st century. For most of us, our daily life has been disrupted and is still far from what we used to call “normal”. First of all, we hope that you and all of your loved ones are healthy and in a safe place.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also challenged the citizen science field by pushing practitioners to adapt quickly to this new situation and to develop and/or use new collaboration tools. For this summer edition, we could not elude this unprecedented experience, but we have decided to focus on the lessons we can learn from it and how can citizen science look towards the future.
We contacted Chris Lintott, co-founder of Zooniverse, and asked him how he has perceived the whole lockdown period on this platform.
"We observed an increase of activity in our projects, but also on the other features of our website such as our blog posts or videos. We felt like people’s interest was not only to find distraction or to reach our star projects such as “penguin count” or “galaxyzoo”, but to actually learn about citizen science."
Then, Jessica Hafetz Mirman shared her experience of developing a citizen science project during the lockdown period.
"What stands out to us about this particular citizen science project is that while it is grounded in the core citizen science practices and principles of co-production, it pushes the citizen science field forward by forging new disciplinary connections among psychology, sociology and public health."
Read the latest EU-Citizen.Science newsletter
Every four months, the EU-Citizen.Science joint newsletter addresses an issue relevant to the Citizen Science field, as well as sharing news from several EU-funded citizen science projects: ACTION, CitieS-Health, CoAct, CS Track, D-NOSES, EnviroCitizen, MICS, REINFORCE and WeCount.