SUMMARY ✎
Putting citizens’ concerns at the heart of citizen science. Science can help communities tackle problems that affect them
The CitieS-Health Toolkit provides a customised and interactive collection of adaptable instruments to empower anybody to engage communities to solve issues of common concerns and deploy actions for making your world a better place to live in.
The tools are meant to guide people from crowdsourcing, exploring and defining environmental and health issues that affect their communities, until implementing bottom-up actions to enable change. In this journey, the CitieS-Health Toolkit provides specific and adaptable solutions for identifying a common problem, design a citizens-driven research study, and proactively collect data to provide evidence that informs actions. If you believe in openness, participation, and citizens’ empowerment to enable change in society, this toolkit is for you
The CitieS-Health Toolkit is designed to enable an interactive experience in designing a brand new collaborative bottom-up intervention or as an aide to your own existing participatory study. Are you a citizen who is worried about an environmental and/or health issue affecting your community and wants to tackle it through a participatory approach? Are you a scientist who wants to explore the potential of citizen science to solve environmental epidemiology concerns? Are you a public authority that wants to leverage the power of citizens to develop more informed policies? Or are you a business that wants to engage with citizens to contribute to making your area a better place to live and work? In any of these cases, the CitieS-Health can be of great help to you!
The toolkit takes also into account that all citizen science projects are iterative in nature and you can choose the tools that are relevant to you now! Are you setting up a new study and want to identify an issue that is affecting your community? Do you already have an issue defined and want to design a citizen science intervention to address it? Do you need assistance in collecting and analysing data thus deploying your previously designed study? Or are you wondering how to proactively design actions based on the evidence you have collected? The toolkit allows you to choose your point of departure across these four phases.
Discover the steps
Follow the main phases that make up a Citizen Science project to leverage the power of communities and tackle common concerns
- 1.1 Citizens' concerns
- 1.2 Research question
- 1.3 Community
- 2.1 Study protocol
- 2.2 Tools
- 2.3 Governance
- 3.1 Data collection
- 3.2 Data analysis
- 3.3 Impact assessment
- 4.1 Dissemination
- 4.2 Action
- 4.3 Legacy
Make it fun and beautiful
Citizen participation is usually taken for granted. Too often we ask citizens to use an ugly app, to attend boring events, or to read tedious and enigmatic texts. Citizens have the right to be engaged in a meaningful way.
Do you need fresh new ideas on how to engage citizens? The toolkit includes a collection of citizen science stories to get inspired from and build your own adventure.
We want to inspire the citizen science community with creative ideas on how to engage citizens and put them at the centre of research. We selected stories from CitieS-Health´s pilots and other citizen science projects that show how to develop each of the phases in an engaging way.
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