Can citizen science be the new frontier of science communication?

NEWSERA, a EU-funded project launched this year, maintains so. To map the current state of science communication in citizen science projects, and to imagine its development in the future, the NEWSERA Team is spreading a survey addressed to all citizen science practitioners across the European Union and United Kingdom.

GO TO THE SURVEY 

This survey will be used by the NEWSERA project to understand better the current environment of citizen science projects in the EU and UK; in particular, the ways projects use to communicate and engage with their community. One of the main ideas behind NEWSERA is to find innovative and effective strategies for science communication in citizen science projects: studying what projects are doing right now is the baseline to build something new.

The deadline to take the survey is February 28, 2021.

• During the course of the project, the data collected from the survey and the experience of a series of co-creation workshops will inform the development of innovative communication strategies for citizen science projects.
• The results will be published in the form of a series of blueprints, that will guide any citizen science project to better their communication practices towards different stakeholders: common citizens, academic scientists, policy makers, industries and SMEs, and journalists.
• Representatives of the stakeholder groups will be directly involved during the course of the projects, as participants in the co-creation workshops. This way, there will be a continuous dialogue between citizen science practitioners and the public they want to reach, with an exchange of information and experiences.
• During the co-creation events, the continuous presence of science communication experts and data journalists will be an important asset for citizen science practitioners, to learn about the state of the art of communication strategies and try out new methodologies.

This will be the second round of answers to the survey, that has already circulated during June and July 2020, mostly among projects based in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal and Italy). However, the survey is being opened for a second time in order to paint a more complete picture of citizen science projects across Europe.

NEWSERA is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, and is part of the Science With and For Society projects.