In 2014, the Miistakis Institute hosted a Citizen Science Conference, exploring this diverse field with sessions on program design, evaluation, policy implications, technology and applications in parks and protected areas. This links to the website that chronicled that event.
Lea Shanley
Embrace the Bureaucracy: navigating institutional barriers to citizen science
Speaker Bio:Dr. Lea Shanley co-leads the South Big Data Innovation Hub, one of a network of four Hubs launched by the NSF. We serve as a bridge organization, connecting researchers, businesses, and government to apply data science to scientific and societal challenges. Before joining the Hub, she completed a tour of duty as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) under an Obama White House program, working at NASA to design and guide open science and innovation strategies for Earth and planetary science – including the Asteroid Grand Challenge! She also co-founded the US Federal Citizen Science Community of Practice, helping to shape the Citizen Science White House Memorandum and legislation, and engaging 125 federal staff to build and launch CitizenScience.gov. Previously, she collaborated with digital volunteer communities to develop social media tools for disaster response and humanitarian relief, and built GIS-based decision support systems to empower public participation in local decision-making.
Presentation: Embrace the Bureaucracy: navigating institutional barriers to citizen science?
This presentation explores the challenges and opportunities with implementing citizen science across U.S. federal agencies as well as the bureaucracies and operating cultures they contain. Specifically, the origins and progress of the US Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) will be discussed. The CCS identified several key social, institutional, and legal barriers to government adoption of citizen science. Some of these hurdles are unique to the federal government, but others can be generalized across organizations, such as trust, organizational culture, data quality, and privacy. The CCS then developed and systematically implemented a set of strategies to overcome these hurdles, including collaborating with the White House to build a toolkit and catalog that were incorporated into Citizenscience.gov, and helping to shape a White House policy memo and legislation.