Hall states that citizen science projects are about people. Photo: COURTESY OF  DAMON HALL

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Beyond serving as research subjects, recipients of scientific information, or members of populations affected by certain interventions, citizens are also active participants in the production of scientific knowledge, joining scientists in the pursuit of academic inquiry. In a recent interview with CSST, Damon Hall, an associate professor of marine and environmental sciences and public policy at Northeastern University in the United States, discussed the ethical trade-offs, digital transformations, and collaborative dynamics shaping citizen science in an era of rapid change. 

Collaborative nature of science 

CSST: From a broader perspective and based on your own practical experience, how do you interpret the significance of citizen science? 

Hall: Science has benefited from the involvement of citizens in data collection for centuries. Citizens in the 1700s were gathering backyard rain gauge and thermometer readings and reporting them to scientists to collate the data and look for trends. 

The fact that citizen science has proliferated rapidly within environmental sciences shows that people’s pre-existing relationships with the natural world—their affection for birds and birdwatching, plants, and other observations during hikes, wildlife encounters, and more—can yield useful information for scientists. This vastly expands the capacity of natural scientists and sciences. 

CSST: How does citizen science differ from other forms of scientific movements? To what extent have we clarified the distinctions and connections between them? 

Hall: In addition to good scientific questions and rigorous methodologies, citizen science requires strong science communication—particularly to make the research activities appealing to participants. Citizen science fits within the spirit of interdisciplinarity, which benefits from having multiple, diverse perspectives looking at the same problem or phenomenon of interest from different viewpoints. Citizen science both requires and benefits from trends in open science. For example, in our lab we pay for open access for all our articles so they are freely available to all people. Citizen science acknowledges the truly collaborative nature of science that often goes unseen in our image of the lone lab coat-clad scientist-intellectual. Much of the work of science is tedious—from careful replications to repetitious sampling to rote analysis to laborious, highly scrutinized writing. In the group practice of citizen science, the most successful projects appeal to what is enjoyable, meaningful, and important to participants. People want to do what is fun, such as fieldwork, observations, or the creative parts of analysis, in a relatively low-stakes environment. 

Regardless of the subject matter, citizen science projects are ultimately about people. Scientists must balance their interests in gathering high-quality data or analysis with meeting the needs of citizens to maintain participation rates. 

Yet with the rapid expansion of citizen science initiatives, the pressures of academic advancement, and the short duration of most research funding cycles, many projects have adopted a more extractive approach—asking citizens to “give us the data, so we can go do the science.” These models tend to have limited long-term appeal. Further, when citizen science participants are engaged with a project that is personally meaningful—such as tracking local public health trends or documenting nearby wildlife sightings—a one-sided dynamic in which scientists are solely interested in the data can come across as exploitative. For scientists, the excitement of acquiring new sources of data must not overshadow attending to the interpersonal relational aspects of their project. 

Participants and end-users 

CSST: Your analysis highlights the ethical dilemmas and social implications of citizen science. In what ways can citizen science become more inclusive in order to help build a more equitable knowledge system? 

Hall: Our 2024 paper in BioScience argues for scientists to consider a more inclusive citizen science that values participants based on ethical and pragmatic grounds. Our subsequent 2024 paper in Sustainability Science provides an adaptive blueprint for how to do this and an example of how our studies benefitted from systematically listening to our participants. We offer four steps to consider when designing new or adapting existing citizen science projects. 

The first step is for scientists to develop research questions that are important to communities. Focusing on a shared resource, value, or shared interest can be a source for research questions that are interesting enough to motivate citizens to participate. 

The second step is to identify citizen scientists’ motivations for participation. This is where social science fieldwork is paramount. My work is rooted in social science questions with a particular interest in communication theory. I collaborate with hydrologists, engineers, ecologists, and computational modelers to ask pressing questions about sustainability topics. Scientists should first see community members as experts of their home places: they have expertise from lived experiences that should be valued and respected. 

Lasting citizen science projects must include social science research to understand what benefits citizen scientists are getting from their participation. What are the specific value propositions to citizens? Research shows that reasons for participating consist of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Most want to learn something new, but many say they are participating to improve the quality and health of a local shared resource—such as waterways, air quality, wildlife habitats, the climate, and others. It is a mistake for scientists to not ask why people are participating. This information can be incorporated into research design changes and all communiques with participants. 

The third step is to identify citizen scientists’ priorities for the research outputs—the scientific products. Beyond the joys of participating in fun fieldwork or analysis, people want to know that what they are doing has value. And they want to see it in a way that makes sense to them. Leveraging motivations for participation should give scientists a sense of the shared and overlapping interests that could improve their research output. A computational complex systems model may be accurate, but it is more meaningful if it is used by others within and outside the scientific community. If the final product is a paper, perhaps share the journey of a final paper as it moves from concept to conference presentations to publication. Essentially, step three asks: “How do we make our products of science more useful to decision-makers and communities?” Achieving this also requires purposeful listening and collaboration with social sciences. 

The fourth step is to iteratively incorporate citizen scientist-driven insights into the project. Careful attention to documenting citizen scientists’ insights into data collection or analysis methods and ways to improve efficiency, comfort, or enjoyment can greatly improve the science itself, the communication of the science, and its final products. This can be accomplished by selecting a subset of the most active citizen science participants and meeting with them regularly. We do so informally—often over a meal where we have time to share with them any project updates or preliminary findings, ask about their ideas for improving the project, learn what else they would like to see from this work. This relationship building has been helpful when we cannot be in the field to fix broken equipment, repair a sign, or adjust instruments. This is also meaningful for student training we do at universities. When the modeler, trained in ecology or engineering, is designing model displays and user interfaces, they can focus on the citizen science participants they got to know over dinner or in the field as the end-user audience for their products of science. 

Bringing people together 

CSST: The digital wave has had a significant impact on the scientific field in many ways. Could you elaborate on some of the more noteworthy trends in citizen science? 

Hall: With the advent of the smartphone—where many people now have a computer and a high-quality camera in their pocket—citizens are able to expand the types of data they can gather without requiring new instruments. The advances in computational power, both from home computers and supercomputers, allow research to handle larger datasets. 

The growing ubiquity of the internet and the home computer has contributed to both data collection and analysis. Games that enable players to put together different molecular structures or to analyze patterns to solve puzzles bring citizens into more substantial and novel interactions with scientific data. Extensions and applications are only limited to how well scientists can engage citizens via designing fun, intellectually stimulating, and meaningful data collection and analysis activities. Today, there are thousands of creative and smart citizen science projects offering ways for people to engage in science and the world around them. There are also websites that track these projects, such as CitSci.org, enabling people to participate. 

CSST: The world today is undergoing major changes unseen in a century. Do you believe that citizen science has the potential to make a bigger impact at the global level? 

Hall: Absolutely. Citizen science can bring people together to find common ground and cooperate closely in addressing global challenges and opportunities. Citizen science projects are fundamentally relational projects. When this is acknowledged, the project and the participation rates improve with the attendant reciprocity that occurs in any interpersonal relationship. In citizen science projects, both citizens and scientists choose to spend their time in ways that are meaningful to them. Documenting and celebrating these mutual aims can help science create more meaningful knowledge and tools for society. For global environmental problems, the scale of the problem might drive us towards apathy and feelings of powerlessness. Science is always a part of the solution—introducing new information feedback loops into our long-held assumptions about natural and social systems. The creativity in the pursuit of difficult questions will help us see our biological limits and capacities differently. Working with different viewpoints helps scientists improve their abilities to communicate in new ways that can resonate with the behaviors of individuals, households, businesses, and policy makers. The greatest result of citizen science is the mutual learning that occurs among all involved. 

Lasting and meaningful citizen science is accomplished by engaging citizen scientists as experts, documenting their voiced desires, and valuing interpersonal relationships with them. Attending to and integrating the wisdom of the crowd can improve the quality of participation, the productivity of the process, and the real-world usefulness of the science. 

Edited by LIAN ZHIXIAN