The CitieS-Health Toolkit: a guide to spark creativity on citizen science projects
By Valeria Righi, Senior Researcher, and Lucía Errandonea, Project Manager. (Originally published in Spanish)
Are you planning a citizen participatory activity and don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, the CitieS-Health Toolkit is here to help you!
This online guide for the design and development of participatory studies seeks to help anyone interested in learning and experimenting with citizen science to engage communities to tackle issues of common concerns and deploy actions for making our world a better place to live in.
Want to know what makes this project so special? Continue reading!
Useful tools, resources and stories
The CitieS-Health Toolkit provides examples and resources for identifying common problems, design citizens-driven research studies, and proactively collect data to provide evidence that informs actions. The tools available are designed to guide people from crowdsourcing, exploring and defining environmental and health issues that affect their communities, until implementing bottom-up actions that drive changes.
Focused on projects that tackle people’s daily lives
Citizen participation is often taken for granted and not enough effort is put on ensuring that citizens are engaged in a meaningful and enjoyable way. That’s why the Toolkit is focused on citizen science projects that tackle problems affecting people’s daily lives. Many of the tools available are related to the identification of a citizens’ mattern of concern, which is the starting point of the kind of citizen science projects we want to promote. Some of the issues proposed are air pollution, noise, odour, traffic, lack of green spaces, and health.
An interactive and collaborative experience
The CitieS-Health toolkit allows users to choose the tools that are relevant depending on the type of activity they want to develop and the goals they aim to meet. There is a section where visitors can filter the tools according to their interests. Furthermore, the project is alive: an specific section on the website gives the opportunity for anyone who works on participatory projects to suggest new ways to engage citizens in science.
An easy path for citizen science practitioners
The Toolkit is organised around the CitieS-Health engagement framework and it covers four main phases: identification, co-design, deployment and action. For each one of them, the framework highlights three expected outcomes, which help envision what needs to be done. Each of the tools proposed contributes to achieve a given outcome. For instance, there are tools that can help you identify a citizens’ concern, others that provide guidance on how to guide conversations with citizens around aspects of the project governance, and others that can give you inspiration on how to carry out a data collection campaign.
Finally, a chatbot to help users go through the contents is also being prepared. Information will be released very soon.
An online Toolkit with a physical (and fun) version
The CitieS-Health Toolkit will have as well its physical version: the Citizen Science Play Kit. This set of bite-sized cards can be used to learn more about the different tools and tips offered in the Toolkit and is aimed to be used in workshops, events and schools, to spark curiosity among participants and involve them in designing the overall engagement strategy of a citizen science project. This Play kit will be presented for the first time at the Mitforschen! The Citizen Science Festival! on the 14-15th of October and will be available for download in the toolkit web page.
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