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Short Abstract

Despite several long-term, self-sufficient citizen science projects, we have had low activity in the Swedish national network. We are now looking for the failing parts, filling the gaps and starting a new chapter for a national node.

Abstract

Several NGOs, governmental authorities and universities in Sweden run and support citizen science projects. Some of them are long-term and provide trusted data to research and environmental monitoring. Others are short-term mass experiments engaging thousands of school children, their teachers and parents. In a previous project, Public & Science Sweden took part in establishing a web portal for citizen science in Sweden (medborgarforskning.se), but the activity within this network has since been slow. Why?

There is an interesting difference between established, long-term and well-supported citizen science programmes and attempts from single researchers to set up and run a citizen science project: Long-standing projects might not need the support of a network and new attempts might not know the essential parts of a successful citizen science project. In addition, many researchers run citizen science projects giving them other names (participatory, co-creation, …) and governmental agencies might run ones they don’t even call citizen science. Thus, many researchers active in the area of engaging and collaborating with volunteers do not know of each other.

Obviously, bringing together a national network of researchers interested in these ‘engagement’ and ‘participatory’ methods may both (i) increase the peer-support and quality of CS and (ii) increase the (financial) support from stakeholders for a national node and resource centre. We aim to avoid the issue of ‘semantics’ (=what to call citizen science) and make it a network for exchange of experience and competence, where we can discuss how to best advance citizen science in Sweden.