February 28, 2021

The First ESCAPE Citizen Science Workshop was convened over 3 days between the 2nd and 4th December 2020 with the joint objectives declared in the ESCAPE description of work for WP6:

 

“Facilitating science community engagement in citizen science, disseminating best crowdsourcing practices, and prototyping of mass participation experiments”

 

The workshop was convened virtually because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. It engaged 37 attendees from within the ESCAPE project partners and the wider scientific community. The ESCAPE INDICO platform was used for management of attendees and collation of presentation materials (https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/21939/). A dedicated GitHub repository was created to host Python source code and tutorial resources (https://github.com/ou-escape-eco/first-escape-cs-workshop) and recordings of the virtual sessions were posted on the ESCAPE YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJJjz5OEUAw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9SzgsZvOCg).

 

The workshop featured a three-part programme, beginning on the first day with talks by five invited speakers showcasing previously successful citizen science projects. The talks were followed by six in-depth tutorials demonstrating the best practices for basic and advanced usage of the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The tutorial sessions were recorded, and all associated code, data and pedagogical material was made publicly available on GitHub. This enables workshop participants and other interested parties to work through the tutorial examples later and learn at their own pace.

The final day of the workshop was devoted to prototyping new citizen science projects using the Zooniverse platform and the techniques that were demonstrated during the workshop tutorials. As a result, two new citizen science projects are now in development and several workshop participants have made use of the workshop tutorials to upgrade existing science projects.