At the end of April, members of the NEWSERA team met for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic during the Engaging Citizen Science Conference at Aarhus University, Denmark.
The aim of the conference was to engage citizen science researchers, practitioners, community members, and other people who are interested in the subject, in sharing research results, experiences, ideas and innovations. More than 200 participants joined the event. The conference was also followed by visual journalist Frits Ahlefeldt, who captured ideas and concept discussed during the events in drawings.
Amid multiple interesting workshops, debates and keynotes, there were also plenty of innovative formats and NEWSERA presented two posters and a dialogue roundtable.
The team had the chance to present and discuss the posters in a lively session, where a lot of people expressed their interest in the NEWSERA results. The first poster presented the results from the policy briefs, with the most important take away ideas on how to improve communication strategies from citizen science projects directed to specific quadruple helix stakeholders (citizens, industries, policymakers and academic scientists).
The second poster described the methodology developed under the first round of the #CitSciComm Labs, specifically addressed to co-design communication strategies to 4H stakeholders and how the project progressed until now. This work received the Best Poster Award under the “From Science Communication to Engagement in Citizen Science” category.
Joana Magalhães (Science for Change) and Leire Leguina (FECYT) in front of the NEWSERA posters.
The team also explored a different and innovative format for a dialogue roundtable. It involved two sessions: first, the presentation of a subject – in this case, the difficulties in engaging participants in citizen science projects – and then a phase of group work, discussing strategies and techniques to engage those participants. Attendees came from South Africa, Denmark, France. A wide variety of topics was covered, and the diverse outputs from the participants involved enriched the debate and provided food for thought on strategies and techniques for engagement in citizen science.
The NEWSERA roundtable, led by Cristina Luís (FCiências.ID) and Paolo Giandullo (University of Padova).
In the next few weeks, NEWSERA members will prepare a report that will be submitted for the conference proceedings.
Text by Inês Navalhas (FCiências.ID) and Joana Magalhães (Science for Change)
All photos by the NEWSERA consortium; images can be reused under the CC BY-SA-ND 4.0 license.
