Paper short abstract:

The interprofessional collaborations in citizen science, within the European COESO project, showcase governance examples and raise the question of how an infrastructural service like the VERA hub can support their diversity.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution will draw from the experience of the European project COESO - Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues, that supported ten citizen science pilot projects involving the social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines, and developed a new service - the VERA hub - now included in the portfolio of services of the OPERAS RI. Within COESO, each pilot presented a distinct type of collaboration between different kinds of stakeholders: a diversity of composition accompanied by a diversity of organizational forms. Not only this diversity contributed to generating new knowledge, but it also contributed to experimenting with innovative knowledge sharing practices. They also fed the VERA hub design, in order for it to be better suited to support research-oriented multistakeholders collaborations. Understood as interprofessional collaborations, the COESO citizen science pilots showcased governance examples and raised the question of how an infrastructural service like VERA can support their diversity. If the design of an infrastructural service can be instrumental for specific types of governance - thus influencing new models of knowledge production, attention must be paid during all the design phases of the service: how it manages to gather users as well as their possible interactions, which resources it provides, and which practices is it more likely to support and shape? This is particularly important in the context of citizen science, which aims to enable collaboration between a multiplicity of actors, who belong to different socio-professional groups, and with potentially divergent needs and objectives.