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Short Abstract

While contributory citizen science promotes "easy" participation through data collection, volunteers co-create participation with their everyday and meaningful knowledge and data care practices. Considering this friction, which is at the core of my PhD, may help us reimagine participation politics.

Abstract

The topic of the roundtable perfectly aligns with my research interest around participation politics and the search for alternatives.

While contributory biodiversity citizen science (CS) promotes "easy" participation through data collection, my PhD research revealed previously overlooked dimensions of volunteer practice: (non-requested) knowledge and data care practices that made participation meaningful. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Australia, my study demonstrated that participants did not simply "collect, submit, and forget" about data. Instead, they engaged in complex, emotionally-charged practices of caring about, for, and with data. Volunteer practices extended far beyond official platforms, since these platforms tend to perform participation solely as individual data collection. Even in contributory projects, volunteers co-created participation, imprinting their own logics onto CS.

In line with the idea of “Friction as Force”, the volunteers I interviewed navigated tensions between institutional expectations and their own deep investments in data. They duplicated records across multiple platforms due to fears of data loss, memorized statistics and facts to carry knowledge beyond platforms (and train, teach, or advocate), and they experienced profound emotional connections to files that triggered memories or demonstrated CS impact. Yet these valuable practices, instrumental for program success and volunteer retention, have remained mostly invisible to CS programs. When programs fail to accommodate these caring practices (such as when seasonal data is erased), volunteers may disengage entirely.

By making data care visible, I seek to discuss a) how control over data may be better distributed, and b) how programs may better embrace volunteers’ agency to define participation.