Short Abstract

This transformative Methodathon reimagines evaluation in citizen science through care-based, community-led indicators. Together, we prototype regenerative tools that value what truly matters—connection, context, and collective transformation.

Description

In citizen science, evaluation often focuses on numbers: participants, data points, policy outputs. But these metrics rarely reflect what truly matters—care, trust, inclusion, lived experience, or the power of long-term community engagement, especially in places at the margins or in crisis.

CARE COUNTS is a transformative Methodathon that reimagines evaluation as a shared, regenerative practice rooted in digital humanism, commons-thinking, and ecosystem-friendly methods. Instead of assessing success from above, we co-create indicators from below—relational, place-aware, and meaningful to those who participate.

Participants will rotate through hands-on co-design stations that prototype usable, adaptable tools: from regenerative scorecards to context-specific indicator maps and speculative evaluation narratives. Together, we ask: What does it mean to measure care? Whose values count? What can citizen science learn from more-than-human and embodied perspectives?

This session builds on long-standing international experience in participatory research, justice-based innovation, and open knowledge practices. It is co-developed with collaborators from the Art + Care platform and the Doing Just This network, drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Puig de la Bellacasa, Haraway, and Escobar—who remind us that care is both method and ethic.

Aligning with ECSA 2026 themes of inclusion, cross-border collaboration, crisis responsiveness, and new dimensions of citizen science, this Methodathon invites a shift from extractive evaluation toward transformative, community-defined meaning-making—rooted in care, complexity, and futures-thinking.