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What if diagnostics were co-designed by the women who use them? In 10 years, we envision citizen science as the norm in FemTech—where lived experience drives innovation, equity, and trust in women’s healthcare.

Abstract

Citizen science is more than public participation—it’s a revolution in ownership and relevance. Our vision for the next decade is one where citizen science becomes a standard engine of innovation in women’s health, especially in under-addressed areas like gynaecological cancer.

We share a bold concept born from practice: the co-creation of a non-invasive diagnostic for endometrial cancer, using protein biomarkers found in uterine fluid. Through deep collaboration with patients, clinicians, and scientists, we’ve moved beyond the lab to reimagine diagnostic care that is accurate, non-invasive, and rooted in lived experience.

In the next 5–10 years, we envision a global diagnostic pipeline shaped with citizens from the start—where research protocols are co-authored, sampling tools are redesigned for comfort, and trust is built through shared power. Especially in women’s health, this shift is not just desirable—it’s overdue.

This session will spark dialogue on how to scale and systematize this approach, blending FemTech, precision medicine, and participatory design into a new future for citizen science. We’ll pitch a blueprint where end-users lead health innovation and where citizen science is no longer a niche—it’s the norm.

Your voice matters in shaping this vision. Let’s build it together.

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CaSTCo is co-designing the future of river monitoring—uniting communities, scientists, and regulators to build open, trusted, and reliable water data systems. Together we’re shaping how citizen science powers cleaner, healthier rivers by 2035.

Abstract

I am technical lead on a highly collaborative UK project, the Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative (CaSTCo) and bring valuable insight and experience of co-designing transformational change in citizen science. Over the past four years, I have helped shape the national partnership dedicated to transforming how we monitor, understand, and care for our rivers. Working alongside communities, regulators, water companies, researchers, NGOs, and technology providers, our shared goal has been to build a system where everyone can contribute to, and benefit from, high-quality water data. My role has focused on technical oversight and co-design: facilitating collaboration between citizen scientists and professional stakeholders, auditing and testing citizen science monitoring approaches, and helping to translate local insights into scalable methods and standards.

Working and testing approaches in demonstrator catchments, we co-designed frameworks for data assurance, governance, and open access. We’ve created training and accreditation pathways for citizen scientists and built trust across traditionally separate sectors — from grassroots volunteers to national agencies. We've demonstrated how locally driven monitoring can inform decisions on water quality, flooding, and ecosystem health.

We worked together to develop the CaSTCo Roadmap https://castco.org/roadmap/ which sets out a shared vision for 2035: every catchment in England and Wales continuously monitored and cared for through a unified, open data system. It calls for integration across sectors, long-term investment, and a commitment to transparency, inclusion, and action. Above all, it shows that by co-designing the future of monitoring, we can move from fragmented efforts to collective stewardship of our rivers.

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From campfires to future sense-making spaces: we envision citizen science where citizens are equal partners in knowledge generation, weaving human and more-than-human perspectives into shared imaginaries that guide decisions, nurture dialogue, and shape resilient, just futures.

Abstract

Once, we gathered in caves and around campfires, telling stories to explain the stars and the storms. Later, we met in the agora to debate, in salons to speculate, in laboratories to measure.

Today, as we face climate, technological, and geopolitical upheaval, we stand at another threshold. We need new sense-making spaces where citizens, scientists, artists, policymakers, businesses, and more-than-human actors come together not just to observe the world, but to imagine it anew.

In this vision of citizen science, the roles of expert and layperson dissolve. A fisherman’s knowledge of tides, a child’s experience of heat in her bedroom, a forager’s observations of decline; all are recognised as insight and wisdom. Citizen scientists are not “helpers” but equal partners whose lived experience are crucial to understanding and adapting to change. Citizen science can become a driver for co-creating these futures. By building a shared knowledge base, participation becomes reciprocal and influential in policy and planning.

Our greatest challenge is not technological but imaginary. We lack compelling stories of the futures we wish to inhabit. Drawing inspiration from Waag’s activities in the T-Factor project, we envision temporary (urban) sites as experimental commons where data, art, stories, and dialogue converge to shape shared imaginaries and guide decisions.

Here, sensing devices become campfires, dashboards become salons, algorithms listen as well as calculate. More-than-human voices; trees, rivers, migrating birds, help guide our actions.

Perhaps the discoveries that matter most will not be what we measure, but what we dare to imagine, together.

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What if by 2036 citizen science became Europe’s democratic observatory of the digital sphere? This vision explores how participatory infrastructures can strengthen digital self-determination, counter disinformation, and build resilience in the age of AI.

Abstract

By 2036, digital governance will be central to democracy, sovereignty and trust in Europe. Hybrid influence campaigns (Wigell, 2019) and algorithmic manipulation (Zuboff, 2019) continue to test publics’ resilience and expose structural vulnerabilities. This vision proposes a citizen-science “democratic observatory” that strengthens digital self-determination (Remolina, Findlay, 2021) by linking citizens’ lived experience to governance and policy.

Current participatory mechanisms (e.g., platform reporting) remain narrow and platform-centred. While the Digital Services Act institutionalises trusted flaggers and vetted researchers (van de Kerkhof, 2025), citizen science can complement formal measures by enabling social scientists and lay participants to co-produce situated, reproducible evidence about regulatory blind spots, perceived insecurity and manipulation.

Methodologically, the observatory pairs AI tools with researcher-guided ethnographic diaries. A large language model (LLM)—a system trained to interpret and summarise human language—helps cluster citizens’ diary entries, generating thematic summaries. These community-curated models are complemented by human-in-the-loop validation (Mosqueira-Rey 2023). Expected outputs include publicly accessible datasets of citizen perspectives, maps of disinformation flows, and policy briefs for regulators and platforms.

An open question for 2036 is whether participation in such democratic observatories will remain largely AI-facilitated, or whether renewed emphasis on low-tech, human-centred practices will re-emerge as an essential complement. Can the limits and risks of AI truly be explored through AI itself, or must we step outside the digital paradigm to perceive its boundaries? This contribution invites discussion as groundwork for a prospective ERC/Horizon Europe project exploring citizen science for digital self-determination.