Bringing together a diverse range of participants and stakeholders

Citizen science brings together a diverse range of participants and stakeholders, who bring wide-ranging goals, motivations, backgrounds, and interests to their participation. Welcoming participants’ views, and enabling them to connect their experience in the project to their existing knowledge and experience, results in a better product for all. However, citizen science projects often assume participants have access to resources (technologies, tools, green space) to take part, and exclude people who do not have those resources. Such assumptions can be informed by systemic and structural inequities or personal biases, especially with respect to underserved communities whose knowledge systems or traditions have been dismissed in the past. 

To connect with participants’ existing knowledge practitioners can invite people to participate throughout the design of the project. If a project is already designed, designers may still invite participants into the design of learning experiences that support their goals for the project. In the absence of face-to-face engagement, practitioners can enable participants to reflect on and share prior experience and knowledge by writing questions, and allowing or creating space for sharing culturally, community, or individually held perspectives - whether in person or online. Such support can lead to role expansion or mentorship opportunities for individuals, which also can deepen learning.  

Example: The GardenRoots project at the University of Arizona works with community members to evaluate environmental quality and the potential exposure to contaminants of concern near active or legacy resource extraction and hazardous waste sites; they emphasize the contribution diverse perspectives make toward project outcomes, nurture social networks and build mentoring into participant roles.

Finally, you might also consider structural barriers to participation (e.g., transportation, language, digital literacy and access to technology, land ownership, safety and mobility concerns), and linking projects to culturally-relevant reference points (Pandya, 2012). Example: To enable those whose native tongue is not English to participate, GLOBE and eBird have developed resources in several languages. Likewise, practitioners can partner with an urban garden or botanical centre to enable people who do not have ready access to parks to participate in projects that assume access to natural settings.

The concerns discussed in this section can often be addressed by including a diverse cross-section of stakeholders throughout the project design process, which we will look at in the next section.