In 2015, the United Nations launched 17 sustainable development objectives (ODD) to end poverty, reduce inequality, combat climate change and improve health and education by 2030. Achieving these goals requires innovative solutions, and the potential of crowdsourcing is widely recognized. Launched in May 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Crowd4SDG consortium, which includes 6 partners*, immediately began applying its hands-on research and innovation methods to improve the quality and quantity of Covid-19 data available to scientists and decision-makers. The Crowd4SDG project has a long-term focus on SDG 13, Climate Action. The aim is to explore new ways of applying citizen science to monitor the impacts of extreme weather events and build community resilience to climate-related disasters. To achieve this, Crowd4SDG will engage with 150 participants and launch 30 citizen science projects through online coaching events and in-person challenge-based innovation (CBI) events.
As part of this consortium, CRI will lead the work package “Citizen science research“An initiative led by CRI researchers Ariel Lindner, Marc Santolini and Johannes Jaeger. The nature of the knowledge generated by citizen science raises the question of how to measure its success, both in terms of knowledge production, learning experience and societal impact. The team will focus on the development and quantification of new measures that can better account for the multidimensional, collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of citizen science projects. In particular, these measures will take into account the diversity of interactions within teams of citizen and/or professional researchers, collected using digital traces on collaboration platforms as well as actual team interactions using Bluetooth sensors. This study will reveal in unprecedented detail how citizen science works, and the characteristics that underpin the performance of citizen collaborations.
You can follow the progress of this project here or on twitter @Crowd4SDG
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* The partners are : CRI - Université de Paris (France), University of Geneva, United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland), Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain), Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
