(PDF) The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science

The Rightful Place of Science:

Citizen Science

The Rightful Place of Science:

Citizen Science

Edited by

Darlene Cavalier &

Eric B. Kennedy

Contributors

Lily Bui

Darlene Cavalier

David Coil

Caren B. Cooper

Robert R. Dunn

Eric B. Kennedy

Bruce V. Lewenstein

Holly L. Menninger

Gwen Ottinger

Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

Tempe, AZ and Washington, DC

THE RIGHTFUL PLACE OF SCIENCE:

Citizen Science

Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

Arizona State University

This compilation is released under a Creative Commons At-

tribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

license (CC-BY-NC-ND). The chapters included in this volume

are individually released under the same license, and included

in the compilation with the permission of the authors. See

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-

nd/4.0/legalcode for more information.

Printed in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Rightful Place of Science series explores the complex inter-

actions among science, technology, politics, and the human

condition.

For information on The Rightful Place of Science series,

write to: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes

PO Box 875603, Tempe, AZ 85287-5603

Or visit: http://www.cspo.org

Model citation for this volume:

Cavalier, D., and Kennedy, E. B., eds. 2016. The Rightful Place of

Science: Citizen Science. Tempe, AZ: Consortium for Science,

Policy & Outcomes.

ISBN: 0692694838

ISBN-13: 978-0692694831

LCCN: 2016908692

FIRST EDITION, JUNE 2016

CONTENTS

Foreword

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

i

Preface

Darlene Cavalier

v

INTRODUCTION

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

Darlene Cavalier

1

PART ONE

1 When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

Eric B. Kennedy

21

2 Two Meanings of Citizen Science

Caren B. Cooper & Bruce V. Lewenstein

51

3 Teaching Students How to Discover the Unknown

Robert R. Dunn & Holly L. Menninger

63

PART TWO

4 When Citizen Science Makes the News

Lily Bui

75

5 Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

Gwen Ottinger

89

6 Citizen Microbiology: A Case Study in Space

David Coil

105

CONCLUSION

The Age of Citizen Science

Eric B. Kennedy & Darlene Cavalier

117

About the Authors 127

Acknowledgements 131

i

FOREWORD

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

It’s time to talk about citizen science. The movement

to recharge the relationship between science and the

public—to bring interested amateurs back into the world

of scientific research, to collect and analyze data, to

share computing resources, and to enable ordinary citi-

zens to use the tools of science to shape policy, increase

government accountability, and uncover corporate mal-

feasance—has been one of the most important and yet

less noticed trends in the history of recent science. The

publication of this volume is especially welcome as a

guide to this movement.

For most of the history of science, the concept of “cit-

izen science” would have been unnecessary. Almost all

science was done by amateurs: people moved by pas-

sion, a love of learning, and the desire to improve the

world. The distinction between amateurs and profes-

sionals evolved slowly, over the course of the nineteenth

century, as graduate training programs turned out

Ph.D.s in science and an expanding network of universi-

ties and government laboratories provided them with

careers. Ironically, as science became more central to life

in the modern world, it became more inaccessible: espe-

Pang

ii

cially after World War II and the rise of Big Science, it

became impossible for amateurs to make meaningful

contributions to science, and harder to conduct well-

informed public discussion of science and its social ef-

fects.

The citizen science movement doesn’t seek to turn

back the clock—no one who cares about science wants to

undo centuries of progress!—but to use new technolo-

gies and media to give amateurs a place in the world of

scientific research, and to bring scientific research more

fully into the world. Just as blogs have enabled self-

publishing, digital production tools support basement

musicians, and computer-aided design and social media

support the DIY and maker movements, ever-cheaper

sensors, cloud computing, and a host of other tools make

it possible for amateurs to collect high-quality data, to

contribute to ongoing scientific projects, and to connect

with professional scientists, politicians, and each other.

In the process, they are expanding and redefining the

place of scientific research in education and contempo-

rary life.

In other words, if you were to imagine a movement

that should attract the attention of scholars and re-

searchers, that would showcase their tools, and give

them a chance to observe all the issues that have con-

cerned their fields for decades—about the credibility of

evidence, scientific practice, the conduct of controver-

sies, the role that gender and social forces play in shap-

ing knowledge, and so on—you would create citizen

science. If citizen science can advance the sciences, the

study of citizen science will be a boon for scholars writ

large.

The essays in this volume illustrate how scholars and

practitioners alike can contribute to our understanding

of citizen science, and offer some clues about how en-

gagement with citizen science can improve scholarship

Foreword

iii

as well. By way of conclusion, I’ll point out just

one. Writing about innovation sometimes requires being

innovative about writing. The production of this volume

escapes the problem that most academic work has when

reporting on fast-moving subjects: by the time mono-

graphs about them finally appear, the subject has com-

pletely changed, and the opportunities for scholars to

positively affect public policy and understanding have

passed. Scholarly public engagement won’t work if it

takes place at the scholar’s normal glacial pace, but re-

ducing ourselves to talking heads with tweed coats isn’t

the solution either. Volumes like this one (and the other

publications in The Rightful Place of Science series) repre-

sent an interesting experiment in making scholarly work

accessible and timely.

Alex Pang, March 2016

v

PREFACE

Darlene Cavalier

Pietro Michelucci is a cognitive scientist at the Hu-

man Computation Institute who wants to find a cure for

Alzheimer’s disease. The most common form of demen-

tia, Alzheimer’s is marked by a number of physiological

changes in the brain, including a reduction in the

amount of blood flowing to the brain. Cornell University

researchers believe that restoring that blood flow could

slow or even cure Alzheimer’s disease, but analyzing

blood flow data is incredibly time-consuming and hard

to automate.

Michelucci has a tool to solve the problem, but it’s

not a lab microscope, a brain scanner, or even a rack of

computers. It’s a crowd; actually two crowds, to be ex-

act. The first is made up of 30,000 “dusters,” people who

participated in the stardust@home project in their spare

time. Using an online virtual microscope, they sorted

through a million images to find seven solitary particles

of space dust captured by a satellite that was flown

through the tail of a comet. The second crowd is the

200,000 people who played an online puzzle game called

EyeWire to help trace the neural wiring of the human

brain. Michelucci realized that the virtual microscope

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vi

from stardust@home could be repurposed to help locate

stalled blood vessels, and that the EyeWire puzzle game

could be used to build a map of brain blood vessels.

Combining the two would allow Alzheimer’s research-

ers to see a 3D map of exactly where blood is and isn’t

flowing in the brain and speed up the research by a fac-

tor of 30. “By unleashing the power of the crowd, we can

remove the analytic bottleneck and dramatically acceler-

ate the Alzheimer’s research,” says Michelucci.

The people who join these crowds are called “citizen

scientists.” They’re members of the general public who

are participating in scientific research not as guinea pigs

or funders, but by conducting experiments, making ob-

servations, collecting data, and engaging their minds to

tasks beyond the reach of today’s best computers. Not so

long ago, “citizen scientist” sounded like a contradiction

in terms. Science is remote, expensive, and requires a lab

coat and a Ph.D.; amateurs might be able to appreciate

science, just as they might appreciate opera or sports,

but they couldn’t contribute to it. Today, though, it’s a

short leap from supporting science to participating: ena-

bled by technology and empowered by social change,

curious laypeople are transforming the way science gets

done. Some are students, others retired; some have am-

bitions to become scientists; others are driven by a love

of nature or the challenge of an interesting problem; oth-

ers want to use science to improve their neighborhoods

or protect their environment. Citizen scientists work

with professional scientists in academia or government,

with grassroots organizations, or form their own social

networks. They believe that research and discovery

should be accessible and useful. (More than half of all

basic research in the United States is federally funded,

after all.) And it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to grasp modern

scientific problems like climate change, become involved

in monitoring environmental conditions, or participate

in policy discussions.

Preface

vii

Satisfied Citizens

Necessity and innovation make it easier for people to

get involved in serious science. The internet has dramat-

ically reduced the cost and difficulty of sharing infor-

mation and obtaining or using high-quality scientific

instruments. Smartphones equipped with increasingly

sensitive sensors, microphones, and cameras have be-

come virtual laboratories, democratizing participation in

science while extending the range and quality of data

ordinary citizens can collect. Equipped with a

smartphone and a few apps, citizen scientists can con-

tribute to bird migration studies, track botanical phe-

nophases, document glacier retreats and the impacts of

fires on desert ecosystems, measure environmental noise

and pollution, and even record earthquakes. (GPS and

accurate clocks further assure that these observations

have scientific value.) Social media can be used to coor-

dinate group observations, publicize new findings, or

share enthusiasm and excitement for science. Open ac-

cess publications make it possible for citizen scientists to

publish their findings and make their data discoverable

to others who may want or need it.

Citizen scientists don’t do research for a living; they

practice science for personal satisfaction, to advance

fields of research, or, sometimes, for self-preservation.

Such was the case for the residents of Flint, Michigan,

who knew something was wrong with their tap water.

They shared their concerns with local officials, but little

happened until they joined forces with Marc Edwards, a

professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech. Edwards

led the study that proved there most certainly were high

lead levels in their homes and, as his investigation

would uncover, this was an issue the state scientists ig-

nored. “They stepped forward as citizen scientists to

explore what was happening to them and to their com-

munity, we provided some funding and the technical

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viii

and analytical expertise, and they did all the work. I

think that work speaks for itself,” Edwards told the

Chronicle of Higher Education in 2016.

Citizen scientists can extend the reach of existing in-

struments or observational networks. NASA’s SMAP

(Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellite orbits the globe

every three days to measure soil moisture levels, but

NASA also enlists citizen scientists to ground-truth sat-

ellite data by regularly reporting their local soil moisture

levels. Together, the satellite- and citizen-generated data

will be used to improve weather forecasts, detail wa-

ter/energy/carbon cycles, monitor droughts, predict

floods, and assist crop productivity. Similarly, thou-

sands of people tweet their local snow depths and loca-

tions to #SnowTweets so that Richard Kelly, a

cryosphere scientist from the University of Waterloo,

can calibrate the accuracy of instruments on weather

satellites. Why turn to humans? Clouds, for one thing,

can block snow from being visible to satellites. “Citizen

scientists’ measurements, in many regions, match the

snow cover model estimates,” said Kelly. Across the

country, more than a one and a half million amateur

chemists and biologists monitor the quality of America’s

waterways.

Many of those water-monitoring citizen scientists or-

ganize into local chapters operating on $2,000 a year or

less, and feed their findings into databases used by pro-

fessional scientists and policymakers. They show that

citizen scientists can make a material difference to re-

search projects’ bottom lines, and the speed at which

science progresses. Presidential science advisor John

Holdren estimated in September 2015 that time and la-

bor donated by citizen scientists to biodiversity research

had “an economic value of up to $2.5 billion per year.”

Amy Carton, former citizen science lead at Cancer Re-

search UK, reported that her volunteers helped success-

Preface

ix

ful identify cancerous cells from drug trials by looking at

slides in the online project Cell Slider. “It would have

taken our researchers 18 months to do what citizen sci-

entists did in just three months,” she reported.

The Final Citizen Frontier

Thanks to more accessible technology, better data-

gathering ability, easier coordination through the Inter-

net and social media, and the growing track record of

citizen science projects, opportunities to participate are

becoming as diverse as science itself. Through these pro-

jects, citizen scientists are collaborating with profession-

als, starting projects on their own, conducting field

studies, adding valuable local detail to research and

even creating low-cost versions of expensive lab instru-

ments to conduct their research. Their data are improv-

ing local decisions and policy-making. And their

independence sometimes frees them to ask questions

that lead science in new directions.

So what’s next for citizen science? We may soon see

the citizen science equivalent of Big Science or Revolu-

tionary Science—discoveries and collaborations that

bring together millions of people, and change the dy-

namics of innovation and research. Most citizen science

projects today focus on data collection and analysis. This

suits the needs of many researchers, and also builds on a

growing interest among educators in teaching science in

a more hands-on way. But Michelucci, the Alzheimer’s

researcher, envisions a day “when non-scientists con-

tribute to all phases of the scientific process, including

literature review, proposing new hypotheses, designing

and running experiments, and data analysis and inter-

pretation, and discovery.” Of course, there are some

fields that will always require years of study and incred-

ible expertise, but “there is a growing body of evidence

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x

to support the validity of public participation in most

facets of research,” Michelucci says.

This field is already disrupting how science gets

done. It’s not difficult to imagine citizen science projects

becoming part of high school and college curricula; local

citizen science alliances influencing planning, zoning,

and economic development plans; or citizens equipped

with fitness monitors, smartphones, and drones contrib-

uting to global studies in biomedical science, sociology,

ecology, and cosmology.

We have only begun to realize the vast potential of

citizen science. This book aims to provide you with an

introduction to citizen science, as represented by con-

tributors from diverse fields. Whether you are a teacher,

student, researcher, practitioner, policymaker, reporter,

or a general-interest reader, we hope this book provides

some insight, inspires you to read more about this topic,

and perhaps even encourages you to get involved in cit-

izen science projects that need your help.

INTRODUCTION

1

AN UNLIKELY JOURNEY INTO

CITIZEN SCIENCE

Darlene Cavalier

The American shad is Philadelphia’s fish. Like the far

more celebrated salmon, shad live their adult lives in

cold, salty ocean waters and swim back to freshwater

rivers and streams only to spawn. They’re tasty like

salmon, too, if bonier and less fleshy (the fish’s Latin

species name, Alosa sapidissima, means “most delicious

fish”). Unlike salmon, though, shad can undertake their

freshwater return migration several times in their lives—

they are a most determined little fish. Shad were once so

plentiful in the Philadelphia region that the Lenape In-

dians could hunt the fish in the Schuylkill and Delaware

rivers with bows and arrows, and the shad industry

provided the name for Fishtown, one of Philadelphia’s

archetypal neighborhoods. Philadelphians like me take

pride in the shad’s hardiness and history—they fed our

country’s Founding Fathers, after all, and were a dietary

staple of city residents for generations.

By the mid-20th century, however, the people who

lived along Philadelphia’s rivers—many of whom de-

pended on shad for their livelihoods—noticed that the

shad were not migrating upriver as they had before.

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2

They were being hampered by twin human-produced

barriers, one chemical and the other physical. The indus-

trialization that powered the city’s prosperity had creat-

ed a river system that was one of the most polluted in

the country. Reportedly, the stink was so bad that mili-

tary pilots were told to ignore the smell as they flew

thousands of feet overhead. Meanwhile, as pollutants

like phosphorous depleted oxygen levels in the rivers, a

series of dams blocked migration routes; they estab-

lished walls through which the shad couldn’t pass and

couldn’t leap in their desperate attempts to reach their

spawning grounds upstream. Fishermen and other lo-

cals did not know all the details at the time, but they

observed declining fish numbers with great concern,

knowing that the disappearance of the shad would affect

their own economic and cultural survival.

Those citizens used what they did know about their

environment, however, to guide their observations and

inform their collection of data about local shad popula-

tions. With their findings, they were able to form hy-

potheses about the causes of the shad decline and

communicate them to policymakers to encourage action

in cleaning up the rivers. It was a process that sounds an

awful lot like science and science-based policymaking.

I am inordinately fond of the shad, and perhaps I

identify with the fish a little too closely. But how could I

not? They are stubborn, persistent, maniacally focused

creatures, and a legacy of a city I have called home for

decades. It took a long, long time before the efforts of all

those concerned citizens began to reverse the shad’s for-

tunes—and only in very recent years has there been

some real ground for optimism. Yet the shad’s story

provides a shining (albeit at times smelly) example of

what can happen when non-professionals become in-

volved in a scientific problem near and dear to their

hearts. In some ways, their story mirrors that of my own

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

3

journey and that of the field to which I have become

dedicated: citizen science.

This book is intended to demonstrate the value and

vitality of citizen science, and its terrific potential for

involving many more everyday people in a dynamic and

responsive scientific enterprise. This book is also ad-

dressed to people like me: those who, as young students,

were not especially interested in dissecting frogs or

working out physics problems, and had little desire to

become professional researchers or engineers—but who,

as adults, find themselves drawn to science, and more

than a little curious as to how it shapes the world we live

in. In some people, maybe, that interest shows itself as

an itch to read about theories on the origins of the uni-

verse, or the search for unknown worlds or undiscov-

ered species. Maybe it’s a hunger to know more about

what lies behind the ever-rising tide of technological

wonders. Maybe the urge is for all things environmental:

to know more about climate change or biodiversity or

simply what kinds of birds are nesting in the backyard.

Or perhaps it’s a quest for greater clarity about the bil-

lions of federal tax dollars being spent on scientific re-

search. There are a great number of us with such

interests, and citizen science opens up a way for us all to

become more involved in following our passions into

the realms of research and policymaking.

In the diversity of projects described throughout this

volume, the term “citizen science” encompasses a range

of activities and involvement on the part of the public, a

range large enough to include amateurs searching for

hidden galaxies and middle school students document-

ing microbes culled from their belly buttons. Citizen sci-

entists are often driven by an unending passion, whether

to protect a species they care about, to speak up for peo-

ple suffering from diseases or toxic exposures, or to

watch over an ecosystem nearby. As Caren Cooper and

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4

Bruce Lewenstein illustrate in Chapter 2, citizen science

encompasses at least two main pursuits. One involves

citizens voluntarily contributing observations and data

to scientists, who then use this information in research.

The other encompasses democratic participation in sci-

ence and science policy, to ensure that it meets the needs

and concerns of citizens. These are not mutually exclu-

sive pursuits; indeed, one naturally engenders the other.

Because of this, citizen scientists can serve in a wide

range of roles. Sometimes they are an educated volun-

teer researcher, collecting data, recording observations,

and performing basic analyses. These roles can be espe-

cially useful on projects that are difficult to automate,

where the human eye can make rapid work of complex

problems. While these kinds of involvement have histor-

ically often been in one-time or context-specific roles,

citizen scientists today can be involved in dozens of pro-

jects around the world. Sometimes, for instance, citizens

are more active in designing and developing projects

from the outset. For others, citizen science may mean a

lifetime of government lobbying with science-based da-

ta. On other occasions, they’re involved in research that

would have been impossible a decade ago—like launch-

ing cube satellites into orbit.

All these components of citizen science increasingly

overlap—that is, engaged citizens participating in scien-

tific research desire a greater voice in how that research

is conducted and what goals that research seeks to

achieve. My own journey to citizen science certainly

bears this out.

Swimming Upstream

I grew up in a blue-collar family, in a part of Penn-

sylvania where not many folks had the chance to go to

college, or even the expectation that they should. I liked

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

5

school well enough, and I got decent grades, but I was

never particularly interested in my science classes. Our

science teachers and the speakers they occasionally

brought in—ostensibly to motivate us—seemed mostly

to address only the handful of kids who were demon-

strably smart and already science-oriented, leaving the

rest of us to search for other passions to define us. In my

case, those passions were the very non-scientifically

taught disciplines of dancing and cheerleading, and I

spent every waking classroom moment practicing rou-

tines under my desk.

All that practice paid off. After getting into Temple

University’s communications program, I made it onto

the school’s competitive cheerleading squad my fresh-

man year. That provided me not only with excitement—

I traveled the country and cheered at some thrilling

games, including an NCAA playoff game at the Univer-

sity of Nevada Las Vegas—but also with an unlikely

career start. In part because I needed to pay my way

through college, in my senior year I landed a profession-

al cheerleading gig with the Philadelphia 76ers, and for

the next three years I got to share a court (or at least the

sidelines) with Charles Barkley and Hersey Hawkins.

That was pretty much an evening job, though. Dur-

ing the day I worked for a company called Media Man-

agement, which performed administrative and

marketing work for a variety of clients. One of those cli-

ents happened to be the popular science magazine Dis-

cover, and one of my tasks was to help with the newly

inaugurated Discover Magazine Technology Awards pro-

gram. The task at hand was chiefly organizational: I had

to come up with suitable nominees for the various

award categories, encourage them to apply, and then

shepherd the submission of forms and supporting mate-

rials. But in the process I had to read through a mind-

boggling variety of journals and magazines about every-

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6

thing from software design to medical research to envi-

ronmentalism.

Not only did I learn a lot about recent scientific and

technological developments, but I also interacted with

the people at the heart of some truly amazing scientific

research and cutting-edge technologies. Granted, my

interaction with these titans was from a chair in the

mailroom and often consisted simply of checking with

them about missing information in their applications.

But the innovators I spoke with—probably assuming I

had some sort of influence on the $100,000 awards—

were incredibly open and responsive to my requests for

details about their work. All of which I found fascinat-

ing—as did my fellow cheerleaders, when I would talk

to them in our dressing room about what I’d learned.

That last fact may surprise most people, who do not

readily associate cheerleaders with an interest in science.

It did not in the least surprise me.

Before too long, my obvious interest helped me move

out of the mailroom and into the classroom. I took over

the Educator’s Guide for Discover, reading the magazine

cover to cover each month and translating the infor-

mation into a form suitable for school use. I discovered

(no pun intended) that the magazine, written for a gen-

eral, nonprofessional audience and highlighting the

most exciting developments in science and technology,

was conceptually perfect for kids learning about science.

It was perfect for my education, too: in learning more

about how Discover’s writers and editors rearticulated

complex material for broad understanding, and in how I

could further explain it to teachers of young enthusiasts,

I grew increasingly confident in navigating a once alien

landscape.

Less than three years later, the magazine was bought

by the Disney Company, and when I was hired by Dis-

ney and moved to their headquarters in New York City

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

7

my responsibilities expanded considerably. They now

included running the Discover Magazine Technology

Awards, for which I’d been stuffing envelopes earlier.

Eventually I became Senior Manager of Global Business

Development for Walt Disney Publishing Worldwide,

specializing in development and strategic marketing.

This isn’t meant to be a boast or even a recounting of my

résumé. I mention it because my experiences at Disney

opened my eyes to the fact that one of the important fac-

tors in the company’s success was the partnerships and

synergies they developed with others—a model that

would eventually become enormously useful to me, and

to the field of citizen science.

In my new role heading up the Discover Awards, I

garnered a lot of corporate support for the program, and

it became a significant annual event for both Disney and

the scientific community. The Awards grew to become

Disney’s largest publishing event—the “Academy

Awards of Science.” There were thousands of applica-

tions and nominations, as well as annual two-week-long

exhibitions and shows at Epcot Center. The role of celeb-

rity judges grew impressively and included luminaries

from Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin to magicians Penn

& Teller, and from the famed physicist Freeman Dyson

to the inimitable Ray Charles. Through the Awards and

supporting science-themed roundtable discussions, I

met F. Story Musgrave, the only astronaut to have flown

missions on all five space shuttles and best known as the

“fixer” of the Hubble Space Telescope; intriguingly, he

was also a high school dropout who became a heart sur-

geon before becoming an astronaut. I met Marvin Min-

sky, co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab and often referred

to as the “father of artificial intelligence.” I worked

closely with astronaut Sally Ride, the first American

woman to enter space, and Dean Kamen, the inventor of

the Segway. Personally and professionally, it was a high

point in my life, and interacting with some of the top

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8

scientific minds in America nurtured a deep love for

science, a love that had been kindled just a few short

years earlier.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that as that passion took

greater hold of me, I began to wonder why it was so

long in coming. What was it about my science classes in

grade school that failed to inspire me in the way that

conversations with professional scientists did? Perhaps

it was the outdated “demonstration science” that passes

for science education (which Robert Dunn and Holly

Menninger eloquently critique in Chapter 3). Maybe,

too, more insidious forces were at work: I had just as-

sumed that science was intended for the geeky boys in

my class—unaware of the subtle social pressures that

girls receive, pushing us away from careers in science,

technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Whatever

the reason, I was grateful that I no longer saw science as

something meant only for others. But I was the benefi-

ciary of a series of truly fortuitous events. What about all

the others like me who weren’t so lucky?

It took a number of years with Disney before I had a

conversation with an editor at Discover that changed my

life. Over time my career had become very corporate—a

daily march of business meetings and PowerPoint

presentations—and I was telling the editor, Marc Zablu-

doff, how much I missed the work at Discover, educating

the magazine’s millions of readers about the ways sci-

ence and technology impacted their lives and shaped the

future. The editor interrupted my waxing nostalgic: “Do

you think we really educate people? Or do we merely

entertain them?”

He went on: “What do you think our readers can ac-

tually do with the information we give them? The op-

portunities for non-scientists to participate in anything

having to do with science in a meaningful way are nil.

People who aren’t going to be scientists are excluded

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

9

from the very start—after teaching the basics, science

classes in schools are not geared toward kids who aren’t

planning to go into the sciences professionally. So we

entertain people with the latest research and break-

throughs, but there’s not much the average person can

do with that information, is there?”

“But isn’t a scientifically literate population im-

portant?” I objected. Don’t we stress STEM education in

school and fret that our students are falling behind other

countries in science education? What is the point, if the

scientifically literate can’t engage with the research that

impacts our future? How (as Lily Bui insightfully in-

quires in Chapter 4) can media like Discover add value to

the way citizens discover, assess, and even produce sci-

entific information? Can’t people like me, who aren’t

career scientists but are fascinated by science, participate

meaningfully in the scientific enterprise—a huge and

vital enterprise, I should emphasize, that’s paid for in

significant part by our tax dollars?

Marc was goading me, but he knew what I was really

bemoaning—I had grown more comfortable with scien-

tists, but I still felt I was little more than a tourist in the

world of science. I wanted a place of my own. Claim

one, he told me. “If you can figure out where you fit

here, you’ll figure this out for millions of people.”

I took him up on his challenge. I applied to a gradu-

ate program at the University of Pennsylvania and dove

into science history and sociology. I was especially eager

to learn how science policy worked, since policy is criti-

cal for shaping what and how research is done in this

country and because it seemed to offer an opening for

non-scientists like me to get involved.

Through readings guided by Professor Susan Lindee,

I started to understand how many lay people, like me,

came to “find science.” For many it was through the fa-

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10

miliar path of activism—a response to a medical condi-

tion or disease outbreak or a local environmental con-

cern. People who had a vested interest were quick to

absorb technical information and take action. The envi-

ronmentalists, notably, also organized communities to

gather and share data and frequently called into ques-

tion the ability of industry and government to place the

interests of people first.

But at the time, 2004, the term “citizen science” (as

coined by Cornell University’s Rick Bonney) was still

new. An internet search yielded very little of relevant

interest. Apart from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology’s small

database of bird projects, there was no searchable listing

of activities that allowed non-professionals the chance to

be involved in scientific pursuits. That would soon

change—new tools were being developed that would

boost the citizen science movement enormously. Fuelled

by the internet, data processing software, and the ubiq-

uitous use of cell phones, it would become significantly

easier to connect people to formal and informal research

projects. Yet just a dozen years ago, it was still quite dif-

ficult to find these opportunities.

Among my more memorable projects in graduate

school was a paper I wrote on the rise and fall of the U.S.

Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which provid-

ed Congress with objective analyses of important issues

in science and technology from 1972 to 1995. Through-

out six administrations, both Republican and Democrat-

ic, this small agency provided Congress with unbiased

information about a host of critical scientific, technologi-

cal, and environmental issues—from acid rain to radio-

active-waste storage, from solar power to AIDS

prevention—before being shut down during the days of

Newt Gingrich’s reign as Speaker of the House. I proba-

bly read every OTA report the office produced during

its 23 years of existence, and many of the recommenda-

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

11

tions for reopening it after Congress shut it down. The

OTA proved to be a very influential creation, and a

number of other countries, especially in Europe, mod-

eled their own technology assessment institutions on it.

Yet it was defunded here, despite much critical acclaim

for its work, and without any true input from the public

on its worthiness.

For my master’s thesis I expanded on the issues

raised by the demise of the OTA, exploring how average

citizens can engage with the complexities of national

science policy, and how they can voice their knowledge

and values on an equal footing with acknowledged ex-

perts. It was then that I first truly encountered that re-

markable group of people known as citizen scientists

and the barriers they were trying to tear down.

Through their grassroots, bottom-up efforts, they

were aiding research by tagging butterflies, monitoring

water health, keeping an eye on bird migratory patterns,

and looking for new galaxies. But when it came to en-

gaging in policymaking decisions, they were shut out.

The forces against them were considerable, coming from

politics and industry. But there was also strong re-

sistance from the scientists themselves.

Scientists and other experts seemed to fear that the

lay public, largely lacking formal science education,

could not grasp technical concepts as they relate to poli-

cy. By and large, they concluded that unless people pos-

sessed credentialed scientific expertise, they should be

excluded from any discussion of how research into such

topics as, say, synthetic biology, biomedicine, alternative

energy, or climate change should be funded or applied.

To my mind, this was wrongheaded, and not just be-

cause a democratic government is supposed to represent

the will of its citizens. I thought it incredibly important

for all interested people to be involved in such decision

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12

making because we live in a society in which science and

technology are major drivers of social and economic

change—that’s why we invest huge sums of money in

them. The changes brought about by science and tech-

nology can be responsive to society’s needs and meet the

enormous challenges confronting all of us. Opening up

the process of how scientific resources are allocated and

assessed, or at the very least making these processes

more transparent, struck me as an obvious win-win: citi-

zens would be more knowledgeable about the science

being done in their name, scientists and policymakers

would be able to better anticipate challenges and do

some risk assessment before they rolled out new poli-

cies, and the societal benefits of our research and devel-

opment investments would be vastly improved.

I had expected the resistance I experienced from poli-

ticians I met with in those days. Newt Gingrich, for ex-

ample, offered the usual talking points for the demise of

the OTA under his watch: that it merely represented

bloated government, that it couldn’t offer neutral as-

sessments, and that if he needed a technological analysis

he could call the appropriate people himself. He viewed

the OTA as simply a unidirectional source of potentially

biased analysis, rather than as a way of engaging con-

stituents in science policy for the edification of both poli-

cymakers and the public.

But I was disheartened when in years to come I en-

countered a similar lack of understanding by scientists.

Speaking with me at an event on citizen engagement, for

example, was an official representative from a profes-

sional science association, who was ostensibly present-

ing in support of such lay participation. Before the event,

though, she leaned over to me to say: “By the way,

you’re completely misguided.” She elaborated, arguing

that there was already a system in place for citizen input

once a bill has been posted, called the “public consulta-

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

13

tion period,” when people could provide comments to

the bill. In her eyes, there was no need for upstream

public engagement of the sort that I advocated, especial-

ly with a population that isn’t particularly scientifically

literate. Never mind the fact that research by the Univer-

sity of Michigan’s Jon Miller found the scientific literacy

of U.S. adults is relatively high compared to other de-

veloped nations!

Changing the Current

That moment was really the start of my citizen sci-

ence advocacy, and it has shaped all my activities since.

Ten years ago, I started pushing to reopen the OTA,

which I thought had the most potential to bring together

the public and scientists in shaping science policy. I

supported efforts by professional science organizations

such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and members

of Congress, including Rush Holt, then a Representative

from New Jersey (and current CEO of the American As-

sociation for the Advancement of Science). However,

unlike the stated aims of such OTA supporters, my goal

was to embed mechanisms for public participation in the

policymaking process. To be clear, that was not their

primary goal at that time.

I founded the Science Cheerleaders, a group of more

than 300 current and former professional cheerleaders

from the NFL, NBA, and other sports leagues who are

pursuing science and engineering careers. From person-

al experience, of course, I knew that there were a large

number of sympathetic minds in this group. I also knew

that they offered a terrific opportunity to overturn stere-

otypical perceptions about the exclusivity of the scien-

tific world. With the support of professional sports

leagues, media partners like NBC Sports, the National

Science Foundation, Pop Warner youth leagues, and sci-

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14

entific stars like Why Science? author Dr. James Trefil, the

Science Cheerleaders have become the “superheroes of

science” both on- and offline. At the same time, the

cheerleaders inspire everyday citizens to connect with

science—especially young women who may be consid-

ering STEM careers—and work to empower people to

weigh in on important science policy discussions.

I created a portal on the Science Cheerleaders website

for projects with which citizen scientists could become

involved. The combination of the cheerleaders sparking

excitement about science with a set of projects that were

open to enthusiastic citizens would, I thought, create a

process to unite the citizen’s desire to be heard and val-

ued, the scientist’s growing interest in the public’s in-

volvement, and government’s need to garner public

support. Eventually I imagined these inspired citizens

getting more involved in policy conversations and ex-

pressing their values and knowledge in influential ways.

To bring more attention to Science Cheerleaders and

the citizen science portal, I wanted to mix up the kinds

of projects that people could participate in on the site

and expand beyond what is traditionally thought of as

citizen science. Not that counting birds or bees or moni-

toring water quality weren’t important—far from it. But

I wanted to demonstrate the field’s incredible diversity

to professional scientists, policymakers, and most im-

portantly, to everyday citizens who weren’t yet sure

how to become involved in science. So the site posted

projects in fields as varied as archaeology, astronomy,

biology, cybersecurity, epidemiology, gaming, geogra-

phy, geology, programming, and zoology, among oth-

ers.

When the number of projects we were posting be-

came unmanageable for hosting on the Science Cheer-

leaders site, I launched SciStarter.com as a platform fully

dedicated to discovering, organizing, and participating

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

15

in citizen science projects. I wanted to make it easy and

fun for people to get involved in projects ranging in

commitment from one-off events like swabbing for mi-

crobes in Project MERCCURI (an extravagant acronym

for Microbial Ecology Research Combining Citizen and

University Researchers on the International Space Sta-

tion)—which David Coil uses as an illuminating case

study of citizen science in microbiology in Chapter 6—to

long-term coastal monitoring programs. And the site

seems to be meeting a need for engaging people in sci-

ence and technology. With the help of a network of con-

tributors and media, government, and academic

partners, the platform currently hosts more than 1,600

projects and events with more than 50,000 citizen scien-

tist participants and more joining all the time.

Yet even as SciStarter rapidly grew and matured,

there still remained the problem of getting the public’s

voice to be better included in policymaking. I was in-

trigued by the advances other countries like Denmark

and the United Kingdom had made on this front, includ-

ing inaugurating methods of citizen participation and

stakeholder engagement in assessing emerging technol-

ogies and science-related issues like climate change. Was

something like that possible in the United States?

To answer these questions, I joined forces with Ari-

zona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy &

Outcomes, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the

Museum of Science Boston, and the Loka Institute to

found the Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science &

Technology (ECAST) Network in 2010. As a collabora-

tive endeavour between academia, informal science ed-

ucators, and policy partners, ECAST has been

instrumental in bringing citizens and experts together to

inform and improve decision making on science and

technology issues. Our most recent success was in host-

ing a forum on NASA’s Asteroid Initiative, which pro-

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16

vided NASA administrators with public perceptions,

aspirations, and concerns about the agency’s space mis-

sion through dialog with a diverse group of informed

citizens. Other federal agencies, including the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the De-

partment of Energy have since enlisted ECAST and to-

gether, with SciStarter, we are forging new opportunities

for people to move between citizen science and “citizen

science policy.” Mahmud Farooque’s logic model in the

final chapter illustrates this vision.

My aim in all this—in the creation of Science Cheer-

leaders, SciStarter, ECAST, and this book—is ultimately

to empower ordinary people to contribute to science,

and for their voices to be influential in ongoing science

policy debates. It is to cast a wide net through the Sci-

ence Cheerleaders, to provide opportunities to actually

do science through SciStarter, and to move people to con-

tribute to related science policy discussions and shape

science through ECAST. Citizen science projects give

people confidence in their involvement in science, so it’s

vital that projects connect with people’s diverse interests

and values in ways that can lead to more profound en-

gagement. This is especially true when citizens seek to

change the status quo—scientific, social, or otherwise—

as in the powerful social movement-based citizen sci-

ence that Gwen Ottinger describes in Chapter 5.

There is already broad agreement that our educa-

tional priorities for our children must include a greater

emphasis on STEM subjects, and I naturally fully sup-

port all efforts to encourage this. But I and other citizen

science advocates—and many professional scientists—

think that concerns about scientific literacy and the in-

fluence of public values on science policymaking should

be the start of the conversation, rather than the end.

There is increasing opportunity today for scientists and

policymakers to inform a curious public about the work

An Unlikely Journey into Citizen Science

17

that they do, rather than assume few would be interest-

ed in it or capable of understanding it. But convincing

the scientific community and policymakers that the pub-

lic should be invited to participate in research and deci-

sion-making activities is only part of the equation.

Convincing the general public—those without an obvi-

ous, immediate stake in the outcome of the policy deci-

sion—to get involved is still a substantial challenge. Yet I

believe that change is coming.

This is not simply the pie-in-the-sky hope of an en-

thusiastic science cheerleader. Those shad fishermen

who worried about declining fish stocks in the Delaware

and Schuylkill rivers could see the impact that pollution,

overfishing, and dam construction was having on their

livelihoods. But more importantly, they could measure

this impact by counting the ever-smaller number of fish

that were moving upstream to spawn. These weren’t just

people with hunches; they were citizen scientists with

data.

By communicating these observations to policymak-

ers, the shad fishermen provided evidence to support

the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Polluting

industries were forced to clean up their acts, and fish-

blocking dams were altered or removed. Fishery manag-

ers placed restrictions on the shad catch, and hatchery

operations have released millions of young shad into the

rivers. Citizen science-influenced policy helped achieve

changes that reflect society’s shared priorities and val-

ues. The shad that once played such a foundational role

in both Philadelphia’s ecosystem and economy are slow-

ly returning.

That’s the kind of profound change I know citizen

science can incite.

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18

Further Reading

Busch, A., & Kaspari, D. C. (2013). The Incidental Steward:

Reflections on Citizen Science. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press.

Citizen Science Association:

http://citizenscienceassociation.org

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, the journal of the Citi-

zen Science Association: http://theoryandpractice.

citizenscienceassociation.org

Cooper, C. B. (forthcoming). Citizen Science: How Curious

People are Changing the Face of Discovery. New York,

NY: Overlook Press

Russell, S. A. (2014). Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing

Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the

World. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.

PART ONE

21

1

WHEN CITIZEN SCIENCE MEETS

SCIENCE POLICY

Eric B. Kennedy

Read a scientific magazine, visit a university campus,

or walk the halls of Congress and you may well hear ref-

erence to “citizen science.” It’s the subject of much discus-

sion, of expanding use in research communities, and even

of new federal legislation. According to many, citizen sci-

ence—put simply, public engagement in scientific re-

search and decision making—represents a radically new

way forward: a path that engages every kind of person in

research and decision making, democratizes science for

all, and offers a new distribution of power and influence

in universities and beyond. The term conjures visions of a

more inclusive world of science, a more engaged public

and citizenry, and rich treasure troves of data for address-

ing important problems.

Things haven’t always been this way. A few decades

ago, decisions were largely made by elites—academics,

governments, experts—who were insulated from public

input or even scrutiny. This rang especially true through

the first half of the 20th century, as much of the scientific

establishment became increasingly centralized, institu-

tionalized, and separated from the average citizen. Such a

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22

shift away from public access occurred for a multitude of

reasons. In some cases, like agriculture or food systems,

the kinds of invention and innovation required to eke out

ever-larger incremental benefits required increasingly

complex and well-funded laboratories and research col-

laborations. In others, like energy production, the technol-

ogies were becoming larger and more complex (such as

the shift from unique heating in each home to a much

larger, more centralized power grid). Perhaps most evi-

dently, the rise of the American military-industrial com-

plex, centered on the atomic bomb, reinforced a

concentration of political power among a small subset of

scientists and military decision makers.

Even at the time, fears were rising about these shifts. In

1961, President Eisenhower famously warned of the risk

that “public policy could itself become the captive of a

scientific-technological elite.” Eisenhower feared, among

other concerns, that the military-industrial complex could

divert policy from national security ambitions toward

profit motives. Still others, like physicist Ralph Lapp, res-

onated with fears expressed much earlier. Like President

Wilson, who was quoted as fearing “a government of ex-

perts,” Lapp took exception to the increasing industriali-

zation and centralization of science. In his 1965 book

entitled The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses

of Power, he raised concerns about an emerging concentra-

tion of science for ends of military and political power.

Although this skepticism wasn’t without antecedents, it

grew in importance and awareness through the 1960s and

laid the groundwork for the citizen science movement that

would follow.

The rising credibility of citizen scientists, who dis-

played mighty influence across a range of social and polit-

ical arenas in the late 20th century, is different. Where the

technology critics expressed fear from afar about the sys-

tem as a whole, citizen scientists embrace and engage with

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

23

the system directly. Collectively, they are a group of ad-

vocates that seek a voice at the table of power, rather than

just knocking over the table entirely. If this is the defining

characteristic of citizen science, then the movement is im-

portant, powerful, and perhaps even world changing.

Is there enough substance to back up the enthusiasm

surrounding citizen science? What roles can citizens, their

interests, and their data play in decision-making and gov-

ernance? And, what does the future hold for this emerg-

ing movement? This chapter aims to provide a primer to

the subject: free of buzzwords, boosterism, and overly

optimistic claims, but grounded in the significant advanc-

es that citizen science has made over the short and long

terms, and its substantive potential for influencing policy,

government, and society writ large. To answer these ques-

tions, we begin by considering just what is meant by citi-

zen science, and offering a quick sketch of where this

movement sits in the long arc of scientific history. We then

turn to the challenges it presents to science, and a consid-

eration of how the citizen science movement might shape

policy, how policy may wish to shape the practice of citi-

zen science, and how the two ultimately represent a diffi-

cult and important clash.

What Is Citizen Science?

Given the proliferation of citizen science projects, it is

easy to think of the movement as having a long history.

As citizen science advocates point out, there is a long tra-

dition of regular citizens participating in activities like

bird watching (which, on occasion, informed local scien-

tific societies) that, in hindsight, appear as early forms of

citizen science. Moreover, there are countless examples of

citizens pushing back against elite and expert judgments,

from fighting for social causes (like to gain the right to

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24

vote or to end slavery) to sociopolitical topics (like coun-

tering wars or calling for expanded human rights).

What, then, differentiates today’s citizen science from

forms of citizen resistance more generally? As hinted at

earlier, the mid-20th century represented a time of major

shift in the relationship between science and society. In

the most profound example, the emergence of nuclear

weapons, scientists had effectively attained the power to

destroy the world through technology. Moreover, citizens

had remarkably limited access to such powerful processes

and people. As the scientist and philosopher Michael Po-

lanyi argued in his 1962 article “The Republic of Science,”

the scientific enterprise had become a real and distinct

society, effectively cordoned off from the public. For Po-

lanyi, this implied a requirement to govern the republic in

a way that brought about social and scientific good, rather

than an establishment entangled with the interests of po-

litical leaders. Likewise, scholars like Don Price concur-

rently (1965) worried that science had become so powerful

that it threatened democratic processes and key checks

and balances required to protect public freedom. This un-

questioned priesthood of science rendered the public

voice unwelcome and unnecessary.

In contrast with the aims and methods of other citizen

resistance of the mid-20th century, therefore, the citizen

science movement took on a particular strategic goal. In-

stead of tearing down the institutions of power, early citi-

zen scientists aimed to be included and recognized as

legitimate experts. This was a move of expansion, inclu-

sion, and, at times, substitution, by inserting and recogniz-

ing their new voices over existing power interests.

Employing rhetoric, symbolism, and pragmatic strategy,

citizen scientists fought to be included in decision making

as legitimate partners.

Viewed in this wide lens, citizen science is a remarka-

bly encompassing term. It includes the kinds of projects

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

25

that are often cited in magazines and the news, such as

members of the public counting birds, measuring snow-

fall, or classifying pictures of galaxies on their computers.

It also includes broader efforts towards encouraging pub-

lic participation in science, whether by hacking or build-

ing new devices; partnering with scientists to develop and

design entire research projects; or deciding how results of

scientific research ought to be taken up in policy. And,

importantly, it has blurry edges, wherein many forms of

political advocacy—such as members of the public educat-

ing other citizens about scientific findings and opportuni-

ties for participation, pushing for particular regulatory

changes on the basis of scientific arguments, or confront-

ing the actions of companies that may be causing harm—

can be included in the realm of citizen science.

Many contest exactly what should be included under

the label of citizen science. While some take a broad view,

others restrict it more narrowly to particular kinds of ac-

tivities or contrast it with related areas (like crowdsourc-

ing, prizes, or DIY). Still other voices use their definitions

to include, in hindsight, a set of historical antecedents that

look alike. To understand these contrasting definitions, it

is worth briefly considering the history of how science

developed as it did.

How Did Citizen Science Emerge?

The early history of science and technology is largely

one of simultaneous co-discovery. Hundreds of years ago,

major innovations in how humans understood the world

or the tools they invented to interact with it were likely

concurrently discovered in many different locations, in-

dependent of one another. From a modern vantage, many

of these tales of innovation are told as the “great men”

stories, highlighting particular individuals, rarely with

formal scientific training, who made discoveries or shaped

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26

technologies. Yet the historical studies of technologies

ranging from bicycles to agricultural breeding indicate

much more fractured, complex, and context-dependent

stories of technical development. Behind almost all of

these mythologized stories of venerated inventors lays a

reality where many so-called “average citizens”—farmers,

doctors, politicians, and clergy—used innovation to tack-

led the problems they faced on a day-to-day basis.

One inclination is to look back at either these “great

men” or diffuse innovation stories and label them as early

examples of citizen science in practice. Yet, although find-

ing such historical parallels may be convenient for a mod-

ern movement developing its identity and lineage, neither

example seems to capture the essence of citizen science.

“Great men” like Charles Darwin or Benjamin Franklin

received significant support from the scientific and elite

establishments of their time, and leveraged more power

and privilege in their scientific passions than the kinds of

publics engaged in citizen science today. Nor do diffuse

examples of co-discovery of technologies represent citizen

science in the modern sense, as the innovation and prac-

tice wasn’t tied to a desire to participate in scientific com-

munities or government decision making. Early

innovators in agriculture, for instance, didn’t refine crop-

breeding techniques to try to shape government policy,

but rather simply to improve their successes at a local,

individual level.

Over time, the institutional apparatus of the scientific

enterprise grew and formalized. Research became neces-

sarily more complex as goals shifted from initial discover-

ies in the field towards refining and increasing benefits.

This complexity translated into increasingly large research

teams, the importance of academic infrastructure to share

knowledge (e.g., journals, conferences, and networks),

and much more complicated laboratories and equipment

to conduct the required manipulations. These shifts had

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

27

social consequences, including the growth of a much more

contained, self-reliant, and defined set of scientific com-

munities, ranging from formal societies to informal no-

tions of who counted as an expert or scientist.

In the American context, it is difficult to overstate the

importance of the military—and especially the transform-

ative nature of nuclear weapons as a centralized, scientific

project—on these processes of formalization and commu-

nity definition. Many research projects relied on technolo-

gies that were developed in military labs, or were funded

via connections to potential military applications. Military

culture brought norms of hierarchy and formalization as

well, shaping the practices of some scientific fields. The

link between science, military, and economic progress re-

sulted in an increasingly tight connection between some

forms of science and government decision makers as well.

The creation of government agencies and departments

responsible for different fields of science (e.g., the Envi-

ronmental Protection Agency, NASA, or the Department

of Energy) further imbued particular forms of science with

socio-political power.

This is not to suggest that citizens ever disappeared

from the picture entirely. Members of the public were al-

ways engaged in various kinds of scientific activities.

Many hobbies, ranging from birding to operating ham

radios, persisted or grew during this time. Some of them

even connected with government or civil society applica-

tions, such as participating in the Audubon Society or as-

sisting in times of accidents or disasters.

A particularly vivid example of this kind of public en-

gagement was the “Baby Tooth” study run in the 1950s

and ‘60s by what would become the Greater St. Louis Cit-

izen’s Committee for Nuclear Information. Over more

than a decade of collection, roughly 320,000 baby teeth

were collected to analyze the impact of atomic testing on

radiation levels within American children’s teeth. The da-

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28

ta, which demonstrated that children born in the height of

the Cold War had roughly 50 times more Strontium 90 in

their teeth than children born 15 years earlier, went on to

be used by physicists and physicians alike. It would ulti-

mately contribute to pressure for nuclear test ban treaties.

These efforts had a different character than today’s cit-

izen science. For many of the scientific hobbies like bird-

ing or ham radio, the urgency for a seat at the table, to be

represented, and to be welcomed by decision makers

wasn’t the defining passion. In the case of the baby tooth

study, it was an effort largely organized by community

members who already had a background in physics or

medicine. By contrast, when people refer to the citizen

science movement of today, they are often describing the

involvement of otherwise untrained members of the pub-

lic in policy-relevant questions.

When and where exactly this changed is the subject of

many histories (the next chapter by Cooper & Lewenstein,

for instance, provides a more thorough account). The

broad strokes, however, are clear. By the 1990s, new

groups represented the face of public engagement with

science. Among the most famous, influential, and now

archetypal of this movement were patient advocates in the

AIDS crisis. Concerned with how medical research was

being done (namely, that many patients involved in clini-

cal trials for new drugs were actually being given place-

bos—a death sentence), a force of activists emerged. These

groups used various scientific positions to argue for new

methods that would allow all patients to be given treat-

ment drugs, while still conducting medical research to

create new treatments.

As sociologist Stephen Epstein illustrated in his 1996

book, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of

Knowledge, these groups took on a new approach to inter-

acting with science. Patient activists didn’t take on an in-

terest in medicine as a hobby, nor as grassroots innovation

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

29

to solve their own problems (like farmers may have exper-

imented with new techniques hundreds of years earlier).

Rather, the activists had to lobby a much larger scientific

establishment—complete with its giant laboratories, huge

funding requirements, drug approval agencies and laws,

and massive body of research—to listen to new voices and

to take a new direction. This required something different

than just casual engagement with science: it required a

seat at the table, a voice before decision makers, and seri-

ous engagement with elites who had long been separated

from the public.

This reveals a key theme in the citizen science move-

ment: broadening judgments of expertise. As much as the

citizen science movement was reacting to the growth of

the technocratic elite, it largely wasn’t for the purpose of

tearing down existing experts. Rather, citizen scientists

were making a particular claim: that they had a kind of

expertise that not only needed to be respected and includ-

ed in decision making, but that was unique and even inac-

cessible to existing experts.

At first glance, this sounds like an extreme claim. After

all, scientists and researchers are conventionally seen as

the real experts; the ones able to discover and share scien-

tific truth with the population writ large. But, for citizen

scientists, the truth offered by traditional science was only

a small slice of reality. For citizen scientists, the realities

that mattered were visceral and close: the industrial plants

causing health impacts to the air they breathed on a daily

basis, or the doctors who had never known firsthand what

it meant to suffer from AIDS. Giving voice to these con-

cerns didn’t require tearing down existing experts. In-

stead, the strategy of citizen scientists was to embrace the

value and importance of existing experts (by reading their

research, having conversations with them, and becoming

fluent in the topics) in a way that built the productive rela-

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30

tionships that would allow citizen scientists to gain re-

spect too.

This isn’t to suggest that all citizen science projects

look exactly like the forms described above. Some exam-

ples lean more heavily on activism and particular public-

interest agendas (like air quality monitoring or patient

activism), while other projects fit into existing scientific

projects (like monitoring particular ecosystems or sorting

telescopic images of stars). The boundaries between the

related concepts of citizen science, crowdsourcing, and

activism are increasingly blurry.

Even with these caveats, however, it is essential to un-

derstand this tension between the long lineage and recent

innovation of the citizen science movement. Citizen sci-

ence isn’t a new phenomenon, as humans have always

been engaged in these kinds of sociopolitical struggles

over how to innovate in the face of challenges, who ought

to make decisions, and how to advance one’s own inter-

ests. But neither is citizen science a consistent thread

through history: the forms of citizen science we see and

talk about today are distinctively different in their ambi-

tions of sitting at the table of decision makers.

This particular form of citizen participation has signifi-

cant power to affect (and be affected by) the political land-

scape. Sometimes citizen science results appear in the

decision-making world as a source of data: a way to gath-

er intelligence and insights about an issue (often, but not

always, environmental) in ways poorly suited to tradi-

tional scientific study. Other times, the policy is acting on

behalf of citizen science, such as legislation currently un-

der preparation and consideration at the U.S. federal level

to enable agencies to better incorporate citizen scientists

into their activities. In still other examples, the idea of citi-

zen science becomes a proxy conversation or movement

for something much more profound: the questioning of

how public-government relations ought to work, of what

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

31

roles citizens and non-experts should be able to play in

decision making, and of challenging longstanding norms

that have excluded regular citizens from being involved in

scientific and technical decision making. In this chapter,

we’ll survey the field on all three of these issues.

Citizen Science for Policy

As was hinted at in the brief history above, the citizen

science movement has often been driven by a relentless

passion: protecting a particular species that may be in de-

cline, speaking up for a community of people affected by a

significant disease, or monitoring the health of an ecosys-

tem under attack. As detailed in the chapter by Cooper &

Lewenstein, these kinds of very specific, local, and

grounded concerns initially gave rise to a new voice in

science: science driven by community members them-

selves, rather than outside researchers. In turn, these

kinds of projects very naturally led to policy outcomes.

Birdwatchers tracking specific species could be leveraged

for protecting migratory pathways or breeding grounds.

Patient activism could be aimed at reforming clinical trials

(like the case of AIDS activists Cooper & Lewenstein dis-

cuss). Environmental monitoring could underpin pressure

for environmental justice in the face of expanding indus-

try or natural resource extraction.

Citizen scientists, therefore, already have important in-

fluence on the world around us through the fruits of their

labor. The data collected by citizen scientists has impacted

government policy, created new norms and abilities in

fields like environmental management, and has even

shifted the way that decision makers view the role of the

public. These general statements, however, give rise to

several specific questions about the nature of the citizen

science movement’s impact on policy. Where and when

do citizen scientists appear in policy? Are the data they

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32

produce reliable and sound for making real-world deci-

sions? How might this change as citizen science grows as

a movement? And are there possible harms or challenges

arising from integrating this kind of research?

To answer these questions, we must begin with a quick

introduction to the variety of projects and initiatives that

may fall under the banner of citizen science. Even the

most cursory introduction reveals something of a schism

within citizen science as a whole: what exactly counts as

an example of a citizen science project, versus any number

of related concepts like citizen activism, hackers, DIYers,

or hobbyists.

For some, citizen science is defined through a variety

of narrower lenses. This understanding of citizen science

largely draws on historical “quintessential examples,”

often grounded in the world of animal and environmental

monitoring. This view of citizen science leans heavily on

data collection and, to a lesser degree, data processing.

The citizen scientist serves as an educated, volunteer re-

searcher, albeit limited in his or her scope: collecting vari-

ous kinds of readings, counting different animals, or

perhaps performing somewhat rudimentary kinds of

analysis—especially those that are straightforward for a

human, but difficult to automate or massive in scope (e.g.,

sorting through hundreds of pictures to identify particular

kinds of images).

A characteristic example of this kind of project is wild-

life monitoring. The Monarch Joint Venture, for instance,

links together more than a dozen different regional pro-

jects that monitor monarch butterflies, their habitat, and

their migratory patterns. Citizen participants can join one

of these projects to record monarch sightings, share pho-

tographs, or even identify monarch eggs. The data are

often collected in conjunction with a university or non-

governmental organization, allowing the observations of a

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

33

large number of individuals to be aggregated into larger

patterns.

As the movement has grown over the past decade,

however, a number of its proponents have adopted a

much more encompassing approach. As a community,

these citizen scientists and organizers have taken on a

“big tent” mentality, characteristic of a movement more

eager to grow its numbers, allies, and momentum than to

prioritize demarcating what does and doesn’t count as an

example of citizen science. This broadening embraces a

wide variety of commitment levels (from participating in

a one-time bird count to tracking and sharing personal

health data for a lifetime), project scopes (from recording

plant counts via pencil and paper to launching cube satel-

lites with various instruments), topics (from the microbes

between your toes to sorting telescopic images of far-away

galaxies), levels of involvement (from collecting data for

existing ecological research projects to co-organizing and

developing a community-led project to address concerns

about pollution in your neighborhood), and activities (in-

cluding do-it-yourselfers, hackers, and activists).

This broadening also means that citizen science pro-

jects can have a wide array of strategic purposes. Conver-

sations with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),

for instance, illustrated at least four roles in which they’ve

seen successful citizen science projects:

• Empowering communities, by encouraging citizens to

take an active role in collecting, processing, analyzing,

and applying information—and encouraging new

groups to participate and engage, especially those who

have previously been marginalized or excluded.

• Establishing ongoing monitoring, especially where

citizens are able to collect (or have already started col-

lecting) much larger, more detailed, more thorough,

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34

and more regionally appropriate data than the agency

could collect on its own.

• Extending research to questions, areas, and topics that

used to be beyond the capabilities of a government

agency (e.g., new species, locations, or questions), in-

cluding using citizen science to solicit various kinds of

public input (such as blended research and delibera-

tion activities).

• Educating citizens about environmental (and other)

issues, through first-hand experiences that teach par-

ticipants about both science generally and the particu-

lar topic of study.

Even this range belies the full variance among citizen

science projects that have proved successful. Some citizen

science projects, for instance, involve citizens in later stag-

es of the work, such as interpreting and visualizing results

according to their values, perspectives, and priorities. Still

others integrate existing datasets (like satellite imagery)

with citizen contributions (such as having the public

‘adopt a pixel’ of the satellite image, and submit a pano-

rama from that location to provide additional data). In

short, citizen science efforts have expanded to cover a

tremendous range of research. Yet, this expansion gives

rise to several questions about the potential flaws and lim-

itations of using citizen science to inform public policy

and decision-making.

Can We Trust Citizen Science?

One perennial question of citizen science is whether its

data can be trusted. Is the information gathered by citi-

zens—especially if they’re relatively untrained compared

to the scientists in the area, or if they have particular activ-

ist interests—reliable enough to be the basis of policy

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

35

making? Yet, this question must co-exist with a larger

quandary: just how much can we trust science in general?

In conversations with various government agencies

and non-governmental organizations, questions about

whether citizen science results can be trusted were largely

met with rebuff and frustration. The generalized reaction

was straightforward: real challenges with the data quality

of citizen science parallel the challenges faced in all scien-

tific work. In other words, the results produced by citizen

scientists are not alone in needing to be carefully scruti-

nized on the basis of their methodology, quality assur-

ance, context, and application. Like all scientific findings,

they are best served by careful evaluation on a case-by-

case basis, and by integrating many different sources of

data.

Questions surrounding trust in science co-evolved

with the rise of the technical elites described earlier this

chapter. One reason was the increasing complexity of the

technoscientific challenges at hand. While some scientific

questions had very clear answers that were easy to vali-

date, many of the problems of the 20th and 21st century

were much more complex. In particular, the fields of

health and social sciences offer particularly vexing prob-

lems. Finding the cure for diseases that are a combination

of genetic and environmental factors, for instance, is diffi-

cult to solve quickly or conclusively.

Another reason is that the very establishment of a

technoscientific elite excluded many from participating in

science. Medical studies largely tested cures on male sub-

jects over females. Many of the research questions consid-

ered tended to be those of interest to well-to-do

populations over the impoverished (e.g., vastly more

money goes into cosmetic R&D in America than into

many deadly diseases in sub-Saharan Africa). Decades of

exclusion have not only led to a distrust of the scientific

enterprise, but also serious concerns over the legitimacy

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36

and accuracy of work that focused on an overly-narrow

population.

In short, the question of whether we can trust science is

just as difficult—or more difficult—as whether we can

trust citizen scientists. Moreover, there is reason to believe

that including citizens in the scientific process may well

help address both of these concerns. Expanding the scale

and scope of research through citizen volunteers may well

ameliorate many complex challenges. Furthermore, if citi-

zens are involved in the process of selecting and defining

research problems, topics that had previously been ex-

cluded from consideration by the scientific enterprise may

be investigated from important new perspectives.

Beyond this “skittishness” around the use of citizen

science, other open questions remain about the potential

of integrating citizen science into policy. As with all scien-

tific data, a major challenge is translating findings to poli-

cy makers in a way that actually influences decision

making. This is compounded by the need for additional

expertise in evaluating and integrating citizen science data

into other data sources, especially for researchers with

little familiarity with these emerging techniques. Citizen

science projects must also be relevant and timely, which

can prove challenging given the long timescale of many

such projects (especially those focused on long-term moni-

toring, but also in general, given the need for training par-

ticipants, allowing time for the research to be conducted,

and synthesizing results). These kinds of challenges also

help to separate the particular areas where citizen science

is the ideal approach from those where it may be poorly

suited.

Data “Fit For Purpose”

While the spread of citizen science is certainly interest-

ing, perhaps most important is the creation of techniques

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

37

“fit for purpose,” a phrase introduced to me by research-

ers at the EPA. Under a fit for purpose model, citizen sci-

ence is neither inherently good nor bad. Moreover, citizen

science should not be blindly adopted with the refrain

assigned to emerging computational power in the 1990s:

“better, faster, cheaper.” What matters instead is finding

the best method for answering a given research question

or achieving a particular aim, whether that method is citi-

zen science or something else. By focusing on finding the

best tool for a given task, the relative advantages of each

approach can be maximized.

For some purposes, for instance, very carefully

planned representative samples are important. Forming

environmental or health regulations, for instance, requires

kinds of knowledge generation that may often be best

suited to well-equipped labs or large-scale, centrally orga-

nized trials. By contrast, citizen science is often the most

appropriate method of identifying potential problems,

flagging areas for further research, establishing long-

standing baselines, or meeting the goals of empowerment,

extension, and education. In many cases, networks of citi-

zen scientists may already have established extensive da-

tasets, professional skills, or lived experience that help

improve the robustness and timeliness of future work. In

other situations, like backyard monitoring of snowfall lev-

els, citizens may be able to offer data at a much larger

scale or thorough resolution than traditional measures.

Some problems may incentivize particularly accurate and

committed public participation, such as homeowners

monitoring the groundwater quality in their wells, which

can benefit both their own family and environmental

agencies.

Largely, however, efforts to include citizen science in

policy have been relatively bottom-up. As opposed to top-

down directives to add citizen science approaches to exist-

ing projects, most of the spread of citizen science has been

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38

driven by passionate researchers and participants creating

and expanding projects. There is also variation between

the approaches of different government agencies because

of their differing data needs, agency missions, and re-

search capacities. While this has led to perhaps a slightly

slower expansion of total citizen science initiatives relative

to the desires of activists, it is largely advantageous: case-

by-case integration is closer to a “fit for purpose” ap-

proach, where citizen science is integrated when it is most

methodologically appropriate to the task at hand, and

where small-scale experimentation can help researchers

learn what’s possible, improve on their methods, and de-

velop new approaches to meaningfully include citizens.

Unintended Impacts

One concern with the rise of citizen science is a fear

that it might undermine or replace government-run moni-

toring programs. In this scenario, it becomes more diffi-

cult to justify the establishment or continuation of an

expensive research program (and the richness of profes-

sional knowledge, context, and capability with it) when

the data can be generated by free labor from volunteers.

These concerns also highlight broader questions about the

potentially exploitative nature of citizen science, particu-

larly if its participants are subject to personal liability

while conducting the work, or if their efforts are broadly

shared without compensation.

Several of those organizing citizen science projects,

however, suggested that it is far from likely that citizen

science efforts are sufficient to displace government-

supported initiatives. Even if citizen science projects in-

creased in scope by orders of magnitude, they are largely

complementary with existing research work. Considering

a broader definition of citizen science as well, such as the

development of lower-cost monitoring tools, citizen sci-

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

39

ence offers the potential for the expansion of existing data

generation projects, enabling government investment to

achieve a higher dollar-for-dollar value. Moreover, they

sustain a significant amount of synthesis and administra-

tive work to develop, maintain, and share the work of the

projects, as well as integrate it in the larger landscape of

science and science policy.

A more pressing question for many, however, was the

implication of citizen science on the policy process itself. If

citizen science’s growth—and the resulting proliferation

of cheap sensors, community activism, and public partici-

pation—is as successful as hoped, it challenges today’s

models of science policy. These tools enable a very direct

and quick-paced avenue of interaction with governments,

especially when compared with the relatively slower pace

of traditional academic research on topics like health and

environmental safety. In many cases, the data brought by

activists may be non-interoperable with existing data, or

represent a very different kind of knowledge than long-

term monitoring citizen science projects: a one-time spike

leveraged as a call for urgent action, for instance, versus a

rolling average. Such examples will inevitably force a re-

thinking of many facets of scientific decision-making—

fueled by citizen science, and similar kinds of community

participation.

Citizen science is also symbolic of a broader shift in

contemporary research toward “big data” and the use of

tremendously large datasets. Citizen science—particularly

those projects involving automated sensors or large-scale

participation—has the potential to yield huge volumes of

data. This pipeline can prove challenging, both with re-

spect to cleaning, integrating, and synthesizing data, but

also in terms of data storage, retention, and long-term use.

Like all data-heavy efforts, the use of large-scale citizen

science data will require the rethinking of many logistical

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questions about research, and retraining and retooling of

parts of the research enterprise.

What is clear, however, is that simply denying the

emergence of citizen science and these challenges is un-

tenable. The movement is growing, and will continue to

challenge governments and institutions alike. It is essen-

tial, therefore, to begin anticipating the impacts of citizen

science, and the potential policy options for developing it

to meet society’s needs.

Policy for Citizen Science

It is common to frame the intersection of citizen science

and public policy as a straightforward question: What can

the world of policy and governance do to support the

emergence of citizen science? This problem definition at

best offers a simplistic representation of the issues in play

and, at worst, a misrepresentation that obscures important

areas of open contention between the two worlds. To view

citizen science as an unadulterated good obscures the rich

and complex tensions that arise as citizen science’s pur-

view—and corresponding influence on policy—expands.

Moreover, such a view risks replicating many of the very

problems citizen science seeks to address: a monolithic

view of what counts as “good” scientific practice, the insti-

tutionalization of particular voices in particular roles (and

the corresponding exclusion of others), and a pre-

commitment (at times, independent of context) to particu-

lar methods of scientific practice.

This is not to suggest that the government does not

have a vital role to play in empowering citizen science

efforts—nor that these tasks are unimportant. Many chal-

lenges with integrating citizen science into public policy

are already known, at least to a degree, and can be ad-

dressed through various government policies. In conver-

sations with experts and thought leaders in citizen science,

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

41

many emphasized a similar series of questions and con-

cerns. For many agencies and employees, one of the most

direct limiting factors is time. Overworked, under-

resourced, and under significant pressure to fulfill a num-

ber of objectives, agencies have little time to invest in

learning new methods and developing new procedures to

integrate a new kind of scientific practice. This naturally

leads to a more diffuse, decentralized approach, wherein

agencies that are supportive tend to encourage the inclu-

sion of citizen science on a case-by-case basis, where re-

searchers are willing and able to do so through their own

efforts. While this could theoretically lead to strong, con-

textually appropriate applications of citizen science, it also

can undermine the need for systemic integration, mutual

learning, and the implementation of citizen science in the

places where it might be most beneficial (rather than in

the places where the project leaders are the most interest-

ed).

This pressure on time and resources is augmented by a

frequent lack of institutional support. Until recently (and

even now, in many agencies), those individuals interested

in pursuing citizen science have largely had to develop

their skills on an individual basis. Moreover, because citi-

zen science is often not the norm, they are left pioneering

integrative methods on their own, including addressing

supervisor hesitation, dealing with questions about data

integration and access, and having to defend both their

own projects and citizen science generally.

A plethora of ongoing and emerging efforts support

the development of citizen science and address these

kinds of challenges. Like on other policy issues, these tools

include signaling support in formal and informal ways,

providing resources for the expanding community, and

providing clarity in laws and precedents.

The first step towards developing pro-citizen science

policy is through formal and informal methods of signal-

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42

ing. Some of these efforts are large-scale, such as the

Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act, a bill which was in-

troduced in the United States Congress in 2015. While the

act itself offered a degree of formal support, because it

was relatively thin on specific deliverables (e.g., funding

or requirements), its informal role was perhaps more sig-

nificant: to signal to government agencies that citizen sci-

ence was something to encourage, pursue, and

incorporate into their formal procedures. Indeed, much of

the signaling and formal implementation rests with agen-

cies themselves, many of whom (including agencies like

NASA and the EPA) have begun efforts to include citizen

science in some projects, to participate in networks, work-

shops, or conversations about citizen science, or simply to

allow their staff to comfortably consider citizen science on

a case-by-case basis.

Once a government has signaled openness toward a

particular kind of activity, more practical questions of re-

sourcing can come to the fore. In this case, efforts at re-

sourcing citizen science in the U.S. government have

largely leaned on experience-, advice-, and resource-

sharing initiatives, as opposed to large-scale financial in-

vestment. Experts at the White House and several agen-

cies, for instance, have been eager to share the value and

successes of “Communities of Practice” established to al-

low their employees to share best practices, lessons

learned, and methods and models for replication. Several

other initiatives, both domestically and abroad, have

worked to develop “citizen science toolkits” to enable

government agencies and researchers to more smoothly

integrate citizen science approaches into new and existing

projects. Indeed, such toolkit efforts have become so

prominent that one expert in the field recently expressed

frustration that yet another group was “going to spend

two years rebuilding all the same toolkits” to support be-

ginners at citizen science projects, when the expert would

rather “see people roll their eyes when you talk about

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

43

why [citizen science] is an amazing and awesome thing.”

Some financial support may become available as well, es-

pecially as the world of funded prizes (e.g., large prizes

designed to incentivize private-sector solutions to vexing

challenges, such as private space flight through the X-

Prize) begins to both interact with and integrate with citi-

zen science initiatives.*

The third role the government can play to support citi-

zen science is by establishing clarity in precedents and in

laws in such initiatives. Several agencies, for instance,

identified internal concerns about the potential legal vul-

nerability that could arise from citizen science projects for

a host of reasons: issues like intellectual property, liability

for volunteers, data sharing, and legislative and regulato-

ry impact. Although large-scale legislation like the

Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act can play an initial

role in signaling the acceptability of citizen science, the

actual battles of liability, open-access, and unexpected

impacts will likely be fought in the weeds—at the level of

local cases, specific implementations, and one-off chal-

lenges. Indeed, it is these questions that begin to hint at

the more complex nature of the citizen science and policy

interface.

Alongside many of these logistical challenges with citi-

zen science—and the government policies and initiatives

designed to address them—there remain much deeper

tensions between citizen science and the policy environ-

* Prizes also offer an interesting case of the power of government

signaling. An American government official reported that one

act (America COMPETES) authorizing the use of prizes led to an

order of magnitude increase in the number of prizes being of-

fered. Yet, the official noted, only about a quarter of those prizes

officially cited the authorization of the act. Three quarters of the

new rush resulted, at least in part, from the informal signaling of

the openness to and ability of prizes, rather than the formal au-

thorization to use them.

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44

ment. As is explored further in the next section, in some

ways citizen science represents a fundamental confronta-

tion with the policy world. It reinvigorates questions

about who ought to be involved in making decisions, how

they ought to do so, and what norms and expectations

define this new world. These subversions lead to challeng-

ing tensions that show up in seemingly unrelated policy

questions, like those of legality, ethics, and the “ideal”

scientific method.

One set of tensions includes the legal dimensions of cit-

izen science. In a traditional policy-making environment,

those conducting research or working on behalf of deci-

sion makers are often formal employees or contractors.

Over the past century, these groups have expended con-

siderable effort to clarify the laws that they operate under,

and to ensure that those laws afford protections to both

the employers and the employees. When it comes to citi-

zen science, however, uncertainty remains about the legal

responsibilities and liabilities associated with the inclu-

sion of volunteers in scientific projects. Both the issues

and perspectives are numerous. Who is liable for injuries

or costs resulting from accidents involving citizens partic-

ipating in such projects? How might this change with dif-

ferent levels of formality or agency involvement (e.g.,

hobbyists reporting data they collect during long-standing

hobbies, versus citizens actively recruited as data collec-

tors for a particular government-supported project)? What

kinds of measures must be taken to ensure volunteer safe-

ty? Who has the responsibility for overseeing these

measures?

Such legal questions are fundamentally ethical as well.

While many government agencies are rightfully con-

cerned with questions of liability, these concerns are often

proxies for underlying ethical or moral struggles about

treating other individuals and communities in virtuous,

positive ways. These questions become complex in the

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

45

world of citizen science, where data are often highly per-

sonal (e.g., health data collected from wearable technolo-

gies), sensitive (e.g., data that, even in aggregate, could

provide companies or governments with knowledge

about your daily activities and values), or significant (e.g.,

knowledge that is closely guarded by a community or in-

digenous group). The use of the data is similarly ambigu-

ous: under which conditions, towards what ends, and

over what timespans can the data be investigated?

Although efforts by institutional review boards (IRBs)

and progress towards so-called “open data” can help ad-

dress some of these concerns, they ripple forward into

their own challenges. Though the protections offered by

IRBs and ethics procedures address some of these ques-

tions, they also result in a very different regulatory envi-

ronment between the United States and other locations—

the former’s reliance on IRBs and other institutional

mechanisms undermining the kind and pace of innova-

tion in citizen science methods that some experts report

seeing in Europe. (Take, for instance, the Paperwork Re-

duction Act, meant to reduce the paperwork burdens

placed on individual citizens, which one government offi-

cial cited as adding approximately a year—of paperwork,

ironically—to the process of developing a citizen science

project.) Moreover, while open data movements can help

to address some concerns about access to one’s own data

(and are sometimes required by federal law), it also opens

the floodgates of potential data use by unintended audi-

ences, such as corporations mining data for commercial

purposes.

In short, while some boosters of citizen science may

argue that the role of policy is to clear the landscape for

the proliferation of such projects, the reality is much more

nuanced. Questions of “policy for citizen science” are not

simply questions of whether citizen science should be

permitted or encouraged. Rather, they’re much more open

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46

deliberations about the kinds of citizen science that should

be encouraged, how it should be managed in particular

(and sometimes particularly sensitive) contexts, and the

unintended consequences it may have in future applica-

tions and unexpected uses. Indeed, this suggests a more

fundamental question to be asked of citizen science: how

does it challenge our traditional norms of government and

policy, and how should we respond to those challenges?

Citizen Science Meets Policy

As has been demonstrated thus far, citizen science not

only has tremendous potential for influencing policy, but

already plays a major role in many existing avenues of

research. Policy can serve as a lever to address the limiting

factors, but it ultimately must engage in a more nuanced

conversation about the particular forms of citizen science

we wish to enact and the values behind them. This con-

versation is driven in large part because of the different

ideals espoused by each field: the expert-driven process of

traditional public decision making, and the citizen-driven,

non-hierarchical nature of many forms of citizen science.

This challenge by citizen science towards the norms of

traditional government decision-making is part of a much

larger call for renewed and reinvigorated forms of democ-

racy. This movement is certainly most prevalent in the

American context, but is echoed in the Commonwealth, in

Europe, and around the globe. It is found in the emerging

push to include previously marginalized communities in

government decision-making and scientific processes; to

increase participation in democratic processes among

youth and other communities; to make data and research

more openly accessible and freely available; and even to

hold governments to account for overreaching programs

of surveillance or policing.

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

47

In many ways, citizen science captures the best of in-

tentions behind these calls. It pushes for a science that is

inclusive, open, and transparent. It calls for the remaking

of expert processes in ways that invite new members to

the table, and that allow avenues for all communities to

feel ownership and opportunity when it comes to scien-

tific processes. And it holds research—especially publical-

ly funded research—to account through demands for

open access, open data, and open lines of communication

with researchers and users. Ultimately, it aspires to open

pathways for participation in science, and to influence

decision making, to anyone who seeks them.

These efforts challenge not only the norms of the scien-

tific enterprise, but many of the values of government.

The efforts of citizen scientists to participate are no longer

restricted to data collection. They call for a chance to par-

ticipate in designing research, determining which ques-

tions get asked (and where, and how), and influencing

how these data shape decisions and actions far into the

future. The significance of these desires is not lost on the

citizen science advocates seeking them. On multiple occa-

sions in conversation, for instance, citizen scientists and

allies described the “subversive” power of citizen science

to “catalyze a revolution” such that “participatory meth-

ods become the norm.” These are pressures that will fun-

damentally reshape science, policy, and government as

we know them.

Exactly how these institutions will be reshaped is

much more difficult to say. At this stage, it is clear that

our institutions are struggling to respond to these new

forms of data and process. Some of these struggles are

fairly predictable in the context of an emerging move-

ment, like many long-established researchers who may

question the validity or value of citizen science in their

work. Many struggles are much more substantive and

offer pause to even those advocating for the emergence of

Kennedy

48

citizen science. Agencies wonder how new forms of da-

ta—that don’t comply with well-founded standards for

measurement, for instance—ought to be integrated into

the processes of creating, changing, and enforcing legisla-

tion. Others are concerned with the rapid pace of citizen

science, which often is alien to the moderate tempos of

many scientists, labs, and long-term studies. Still more

wonder about the representativeness of citizen science,

and whether particular citizen science projects risk mar-

ginalizing some people from participation in this new

wave of efforts.

The very act of surfacing these questions has value.

Questions of validity, standards, process, representative-

ness, and inclusivity have always been central to the scien-

tific enterprise. These are not—or at least should not be—

new questions, even if they have long been obscured or

overlooked in the quest to “do science.” What kind of data

should drive regulatory processes, for instance, should

not be a taken-for-granted assumption, but should rather

be subject to explicit, regular, and reflective consideration.

Determining which research questions are worth asking,

what kinds of methods should be used to answer them,

and which people and communities might have relevant

knowledge—these should all be questions scientists ex-

plicitly engage with through all stages of their research.

In short, whether one conceives of citizen science in a

narrow way, or much more broadly, it is clear that it chal-

lenges our norms about how science and governance

should be done. In none of these challenges should we

assume that citizen science offers a perfect or complete

answer, or an alternative model that should be adopted

wholesale and without reflection. Rather, it is the process

of asking these questions and engaging in explicit reflec-

tion and redesign that is most valuable.

When Citizen Science Meets Science Policy

49

Conclusion

The world of citizen science is rapidly emerging and,

in many contexts, is already upon us. It’s a massively di-

verse field, ranging from projects that engage the public in

bird watching or air quality monitoring, through to re-

search efforts where members of the public themselves

drive the very design of the entire project. Citizen science

has provided an untold amount of data for research, and

has galvanized efforts up to and including a Congression-

al act to support its growth.

In the chapters that follow, we offer a glimpse of the

past, present, and future of citizen science. From a history

of the field to several in-depth examples of its use today,

this book provides a quick guide to what people mean

when they refer to “citizen science,” and how it might im-

pact everything from government laws to private busi-

nesses, and from worldwide environmental monitoring to

your very own health. At the same time, the chapters offer

implicit and explicit connections back to the questions and

topics raised in the past few pages. How will citizen sci-

ence affect the decisions made in this world? How might

governments and other institutions try to empower or

shape it? And how might it cause us to reimagine and re-

design government and society itself?

Citizen science is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It

has the potential to make a life-and-death difference for

communities that have long been excluded from decision

making, while also containing the possibility of tremen-

dous risk and challenge. It’s an essential topic to know

and understand for two reasons. First, citizen science and

its related movements are already having a transforma-

tional impact on science, often for the better, and are

bound to expand in scope. Second, and perhaps most im-

portantly, citizen science has the power to raise many

questions about the who, how, when, where, and why

behind science and decision making—questions that are

Kennedy

50

long overdue to be asked, and incredibly important to

grapple with.

Further Reading

Bowser, A. and Shanley, L. (2013). New Visions in Citizen

Science. Wilson Center, Case Study Series Volume 3.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/new-

visions-citizen-science

Corburn, J. (2005). Street Science: Community Knowledge and

Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Catalogue:

https://ccsinventory.wilsoncenter.org/

Gellman, R. (2015). Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science, and the

Law: Legal Issues Affecting Federal Agencies. Wilson Cen-

ter, Policy Series Volume 3.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/crowdso

urcing-citizen-science-and-the-law-legal-issues-

affecting-federal-agencies

Haklay, M. M. (2015). Citizen Science and Policy: A European

Perspective. Wilson Center, Case Study Series Volume

4. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/citizen-

science-and-policy-european-perspective

Ottinger, G. (2010). “Buckets of resistance: Standards and

the effectiveness of citizen science.” Science, Technology

& Human values 35(2): 244-270.

51

2

TWO MEANINGS OF CITIZEN

SCIENCE

Caren B. Cooper and

Bruce V. Lewenstein

An Initial Story of Citizen Science: Democratized Citi-

zen Science

In 1981, AIDS was recognized as an epidemic. In 1985, the

HIV antibody test became available to the public. Before there

were effective treatments, people without symptoms were learn-

ing that they were infected. Seasoned activists in the gay com-

munity came to realize that the future of their health required a

close working relationship with immunologists, virologists, mo-

lecular biologists, epidemiologists, and physicians.

These AIDS activists took a four-pronged strategy to gain

credibility and authority. First, by attending conferences, cri-

tiquing research papers, and receiving tutoring, activists

learned the language of researchers and pharmaceutical compa-

nies, and the culture of medical science. Once activists were able

to talk about viral assays, reverse transcription, cytokine regula-

tion, and epitope mapping, scientists were receptive to discus-

sions. Second, activists represented people with HIV/AIDS and

helped ensure that enough people would enroll in treatment

trials and comply with protocols to make the trials scientifically

Cooper & Lewenstein

52

useful. Third, activists shifted the discourse away from historic

abuses of clinical trials tainted by lack of informed consent,

moving instead to a conception of experimental treatments as a

social good to which everybody should have equal access. They

argued for the right of human subjects to assume the risks of

experimental therapies and to be informed partners in research.

Finally, activists and researchers who believed drugs should be

tested in real-world situations with heterogeneous groups

changed the protocols for clinical trials.

Ultimately, research improved as treatment activists—

members of the lay public—influenced not only the design, con-

duct, and interpretation of clinical trials, but also the speed with

which they were carried out. On the basic premise that AIDS

clinical trials were simultaneously research and medical care,

the timeframe for testing the safety and efficacy of AIDS drugs

was reduced to months, rather than years.

A Second Story of Citizen Science: Contributory Citizen

Science

eBird is a free, online citizen-science project that began in

2002, within which a global network of bird watchers contribute

their bird observations to a central database. Well over three

million people have engaged in eBird: in 2015 alone, over 1.5

million people engaged with eBird via the website or mobile de-

vices. Over the years, 270,000 participants have submitted data

(<10%) and an estimated 1% have submitted 99% of data. The

1% includes the world’s best birders as well as less skilled but

highly dedicated backyard bird watchers. Since 2006, eBird has

grown 40% every year, which makes it one of the fastest grow-

ing biodiversity datasets in existence. It has amassed more than

280 million bird observations from almost two million locations,

with observations from every country on the planet.

The most frequent use of the eBird database is through

handheld apps that people use to figure out where to go bird-

watching. In the early years, 2002-2005, with the slogan “Bird-

ing For a Purpose,” the project failed to engage a sufficient

Two Meanings of Citizen Science

53

number of birders. In 2006, project managers changed their

strategy, and introduced the tagline “Birding in the 21st Centu-

ry.” The shift in philosophy, as illustrated by the shift in slo-

gans, made the project successful. eBird moved away from

appealing to a birder’s sense of duty, succeeding instead by help-

ing birders embrace the excitement of getting better at their hob-

by while simultaneously impacting the future.

The project leaders showed other birders how using eBird

makes them better birders. And better birders make better sci-

ence, because they provide better data. For example, they submit

complete checklists. Initially, 75% of submissions to eBird were

incomplete checklists; now over 80% are complete. The last two

State of the Birds reports (created by a coalition of conservation

organizations) relied on eBird data to examine species occur-

rence, habitat types, and land ownership at a level of detail nev-

er achieved before. These reports inform decisions of the U.S.

Fish & Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service. The Nature

Conservancy uses eBird data to identify which rice farmers in

the Central Valley of California they should ask to flood their

fields at just the right time for migrating waterfowl. Researchers

have written more than 100 peer-reviewed publications using

eBird.

The examples above can both be described as “citizen

science.” The first fits a use of the term introduced in the

mid-1990s by British sociologist Alan Irwin (1995) to de-

scribe a more democratic, participatory science. The sec-

ond fits a use of the term that can be traced back to Rick

Bonney, then a program director at the Cornell Laboratory

of Ornithology, as he tried to describe projects where non-

scientists contributed scientific data. Below we explain

these two meanings of the phrase citizen science, give a

brief account of how they emerged, and explore the sweet

spot where the two overlap.

Cooper & Lewenstein

54

Alan Irwin: The Citizenship of Science

In the late 20th century, historians and sociologists of

science increasingly understood that science is embedded

in the fabric of society. Consequently, some aspects of sci-

ence are shaped by major threads in that fabric. For exam-

ple, institutional forces (such as military and corporate

interests) may dominate scientific agendas, instead of the

agendas representing the needs and desires of broader

publics. One can see this in the way that interests of the

pharmaceutical industry drive much research on cures for

cancer, even though some public interest groups suggest

that we need more research on the environmental causes

of cancer. Irwin’s work—in a 1995 book titled Citizen Sci-

ence—addressed the varied social pressures shaping sci-

ence by seeking to reclaim two dimensions of the

relationship of citizens with science:

1. Science should address the needs and concerns of citi-

zens, and seek to meet those needs.

2. The process of producing reliable knowledge could be

developed and enacted by citizens themselves. People

bring into science such things as local contextual

knowledge and real-world geographic, political, and

moral constraints generated outside of formal scientific

institutions.

Though Irwin’s idea of a more democratic science has

been widely used by scholars in the sociology and politics

of science, his use of the term “citizen science” did not

itself acquire scholarly cachet. Instead, researchers came to

use terms like “activist science” or “public engagement.”

Rick Bonney: Contributing Observations to the Scien-

tific Method

The second meaning of citizen science developed in

ornithology, when Bonney used it to describe birdwatch-

Two Meanings of Citizen Science

55

ers’ voluntary contributions of observations across North

America. According to Bonney, the term came to him as

he stared out the window while writing a grant proposal

in 1994 to support collection of those contributions. He

used the phrase publicly in a 1996 magazine article, not

knowing about Irwin’s work. “Citizen science” became

widely used at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; then, as

the Lab of Ornithology developed new projects and con-

nected with analogous volunteer efforts by other organi-

zations, the term spread.

In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary documented

that the phrase citizen science was actually used before

Irwin and Bonney. In 1989, the National Audubon Society

used the term in a way similar to Bonney’s use—in their

case to describe a program where volunteers collected rain

samples, tested the acidity levels, and sent results to

Audubon headquarters. The OED defined citizen science

as “the collection and analysis of data relating to the natu-

ral world by members of the general public, typically as

part of a collaborative project with professional scientists.”

Thus the earliest use of the term described projects in

which a professional entity designed a scientific project

and geographically dispersed volunteers contributed ob-

servations, usually in ways that aligned with their hobbies

and interests. Because of the large number of these pro-

jects, the term has most frequently been equated with

these top-down projects, with an emphasis on volunteer

data contributions. More recently, the term has been used

to describe a wide variety of styles in which the public

helps carry out any of the steps of the scientific method,

whether conceiving of the research questions, designing

methods, collecting the data, and/or interpreting results.

These other styles include projects that involve more col-

laboration between scientists and nonscientists in project

design and even projects that emerge from community

Cooper & Lewenstein

56

needs with only advisory input from professional scien-

tists.

The second usage of citizen science gained popularity

with the media. By the early 21st century, a community of

project developers sought to unite various public en-

gagement practices into a professional field of practice.

But in the process, these practitioners recognized draw-

backs in the term citizen science. Some felt the word “citi-

zen” excluded those not claiming citizenship in the

country where they contributed to projects (such as mi-

grant workers engaged in community-based forestry to

sustainably harvest salal, a non-timber forest product

used in the floral industry). Others felt the term only per-

tained to contributory style projects and therefore exclud-

ed community-based projects (such as projects monitoring

polluted waste emerging from industrial plants). Still oth-

ers felt the term required the abandonment of other terms

with longer histories, such as participatory action research

and community-based management.

Although each of these critiques raised issues similar

to those addressed in Irwin’s 1995 study, few people in

the practitioner community knew of that scholarly work.

In 2009, an effort was made to identify a broader term, re-

naming the field as public participation in scientific re-

search, or PPSR. But by the middle of the second decade

of the 21st century, the term citizen science had become the

most popular, with little recognition that the phrase unin-

tentionally co-opted Irwin’s original intent.

The History of Citizen Science

Although the term is relatively new, the practice is old.

The professionalization of modern scientific practices oc-

curred in the late 19th century. Before scientists were called

scientists, they were called men of science and natural phi-

losophers. Before citizen science was called citizen science,

Two Meanings of Citizen Science

57

the practice of gathering observations by enlisting the help

of hundreds, even thousands, of ordinary people was not

referred to by any particular term at all. Even relatively

recently, when initiated by conservation organizations

like the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission in

1982, the practice of enlisting the lay public in monitoring

beaches and collecting data on turtle nesting was simply

termed volunteer monitoring. The practice of what is now

frequently called citizen science did not begin with the

coining of the term. We can use the term citizen science

with historic activities and see that leaders in science in

the 18th and 19th century carried out citizen science.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson made plans for the collection

of weather data across the state of Virginia via what

would today be called contributory citizen science. Begin-

ning in the late 1840s, U.S. Naval officer Matthew Maury

created maps of the seasonal distribution of whales and of

ocean wind and currents by aggregating observations re-

ported by thousands of military and merchant vessels.

William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, won a Royal

medal for work based on almost a million observations of

the tides systematically, and synchronously, collected by

lay people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in 1835.

Denison Olmsted, professor at Yale, crowdsourced meteor

observations in 1833.

So for more than 200 years, scientists have been

crowdsourcing observations. Today citizen science is an

umbrella term under which to describe a practice that is

occurring in many disciplines in which volunteers collect

and/or process data. Many whole fields have long histo-

ries of such a practice. For example, the longest-running

meteorological records in the United States were collected

by volunteers in the National Observers Network, which

started in 1880. The longest running ornithological sur-

veys in the United States have been carried out by bird

watchers in the Christmas Bird Count since 1900.

Cooper & Lewenstein

58

Other fields have shorter histories of such practices,

with the speed and ubiquity of communication and in-

formation technologies assisting in creating new research

frontiers. For example, volunteers in exclusively online

projects solve three-dimensional puzzles of protein fold-

ing, individuals use automated sensors to detect earth-

quakes, and indigenous people in non-literate

communities use smartphones to map important natural

resources. Public and scientist collaborations continue to

expand using a variety of labels: for example, community-

based natural resource management, participatory action

research, participatory forestry, and volunteer geographic

information. Despite its limitations, citizen science pro-

vides a useful, catchall term for all contemporary activities

in which the public is involved in the scientific method.

Yet there is still the question of how the “public partic-

ipation” type of citizen science links with the “democratic

action” idea introduced by Irwin. If the term has come to

represent a multitude of ways that the public is involved

in science, what distinguishes it from Irwin’s initial intent?

In the practitioner world, citizen science originally re-

ferred only to participation in data collection; it then ex-

panded to practices that include the public in other

aspects of the scientific method, such as formulating the

question and interpreting data. Nonscientists, however,

can engage in the production of reliable knowledge (also

known as “science”) in ways other than contributing data.

Publics can pose original questions. They can identify rel-

evant variables and sources of data that professional sci-

entists would miss. They can shape the norms and

practices established around the scientific enterprise of

validating knowledge. Each of these contributes to a more

democratic vision of science embedded in society. While

the “participatory” version of citizen science describes

how people can serve as instruments in the scientific

method, the “democratic” version shows how people can

influence and transform the larger scientific enterprise.

Two Meanings of Citizen Science

59

The term is coming full circle. Increasingly, practition-

ers of the “participatory” citizen science see “democratic”

citizen science as their goal. Particularly in projects that

involve environmental monitoring and environmental

justice, practitioners and participants seek to transform

the power dynamics of local, regional, national, and even

international communities. They seek to exercise power

that challenges the interests of large government, corpo-

rate, or even academically-based research communities.

The technical details explored in the subsequent chap-

ters of this book largely relate to crowdsourcing observa-

tions by the public (the participatory model). But

ultimately, a larger reason for refining citizen science

methods is to increase capacity for research agendas to

align with public interests. Practitioners of citizen science

seek a hybrid of the Bonney/OED and Irwin meanings:

essentially, a gold standard for citizen science practice in

which people do more than contribute data, and research-

ers do more than use the data. Together, a new relation-

ship between scientists and the public will be created.

Citizen science strives for designs that will achieve what

Irwin envisioned with his original use of the term: scien-

tists engaging with people in ways that deeply shape

what we know about the world.

A Third Story of Citizen Science: Democratized and

Contributory

With a phone call to Marc Edwards, an engineering profes-

sor at Virginia Tech in April 2015, LeeAnne Walters, a resident

of Flint, Michigan, set in motion the development of the Flint

Water Study, a citizen science project to measure lead levels in

tap water. Walters was a stay-at-home mom who could not get

state or local officials to respond to her concerns about rusty

orange tap water, thinning hair, and skin irritations in her

home.

Cooper & Lewenstein

60

Edwards responded with citizen science. For preliminary da-

ta, he taught Walters to take tap water samples that he could

test. Even though Edwards found exceedingly high levels of lead

in Walters’s water, he was initially ignored when he brought the

findings to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So Ed-

wards created the Flint Water Study with his students, some

funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and more

funds from an online crowdfunding campaign. Participants in

the Flint Water Study received special water vials, collected tap

water according to a specific protocol, and mailed the samples

for processing at Virginia Tech. Data were publicly available

and displayed. Walters created the “Water Warriors” to collect

samples and helped them use the data to support their political

action.

The results of the project garnered national media attention

and broader public pressure, forcing government actions (short-

term provisioning of bottled water, testing of blood levels,

movement towards long-term solutions) and inspiring commu-

nity service (e.g., hundreds of union plumbers installed water

filters for free). The project that began with data collection be-

came a key element of a national political debate about social

power in settings where technical expertise is necessary.

The third story of citizen science illustrates the

achievement of “democratic” citizen science through the

“contributory” style of citizen science. One way of under-

standing the relationship between the meanings of “citi-

zen science” explored in this chapter is that the

“democratic” definition represents a larger context in

which the “contributory” style of citizen science resides.

The lowest common denominator to citizen science pro-

jects is the collection and/or processing of data. From that

focal point, the collaboration between scientists and non-

scientists can expand. If the collaboration expands

enough, the resulting new relationship then takes on the

vision presented by Irwin, characterized by new perspec-

tives, collaborative action, trust, etc., leading ultimately to

societal influence shaping scientific agendas and norms.

Two Meanings of Citizen Science

61

Further Reading

Ballard, H. L. & Belsky, J. M. (2010). “Participatory action

research and environmental learning: implications for

resilient forests and communities.” Environmental Edu-

cation Research 16: 611-627.

Bonney, R. (1996). “Citizen Science: A Lab Tradition.” Liv-

ing Bird 15(4): 7-15.

Bonney, R., Ballard, H., Jordan, R., McCallie, E., Phillips,

T. Shirk, J., & Wilderman, C. C. (2009). Participation in

Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing Its Po-

tential for Informal Science Education CAISE Inquiry

Group Reports. Washington, DC: Center for Advance-

ment of Informal Science Education.

Conde, M. (2014). “Activism mobilizing science.” Ecologi-

cal Economics 105: 67-77.

Cooper, C. B., Dickinson, J., Phillips, T., & Bonney, R.

(2007). “Citizen Science as a Tool for Conservation in

Residential Ecosystems.” Ecology and Society 12(2): 11.

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/ vol12/iss2/art11

Cornwall, M. L. & Campbell, L. M. (2012). “Co-producing

conservation and knowledge: citizen-based sea turtle

monitoring in North Carolina, USA.” Social Studies of

Science 42: 101-120.

Epstein, S. (1995). “The construction of lay expertise: AIDS

activism and the forging of credibility in the reform of

clinical trials.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 20:

408-437.

Irwin, A. (1995). Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise,

and Sustainable Development. New York, NY: Routledge.

Littman, M., & Suomela, T. (2014). “Crowdsourcing, the

great meteor storm of 1833, and the founding of mete-

or science.” Endeavour 38(2): 130-138.

63

3

TEACHING STUDENTS HOW TO

DISCOVER THE UNKNOWN

Robert R. Dunn and Holly L. Menninger

In the early 1400s, at the end of the Middle Ages in

what is now Italy, when knowledge was being reborn,

anatomists would read from an ancient Greek text while

their assistants dissected a human body and pointed out

its parts. If the body looked different from what was writ-

ten in the thousand-year-old text it was seen to be mutant,

deviant, wrong. No matter that the ancient Greek

knowledge was flawed and many of the rather ordinary

observations that were being made would have dramati-

cally improved on what was known. It would take a major

scientific revolution for anatomists to begin to actually

observe and learn from dissections. The idea that more

knowledge could be gained was a breakthrough. Looking

back, it’s shocking how hard it was for early scientists to

figure out obvious things.

Not so long ago, we were reminded of those Italian

anatomists when walking past a classroom in which un-

dergraduates were dissecting cats. Around the world—

but particularly in the United States, where as many as

79% of middle and high school biology teachers report

Dunn & Menninger

64

using dissections in their classes—millions of cats, dogs,

pigs, and other mammals, including thousands and thou-

sands of humans, are dissected in anatomy classes. They

are dissected in order to teach students—including all of

those who will eventually operate on your body—how an

average mammal, amphibian, or other body works.

One can discuss the merits or the morality of having

students perform dissections. We won’t do either, though

we can probably all agree that we owe it to the people and

animals whose bodies are being pulled apart to use them

as effectively as possible. My (Rob’s) grandfather donated

his body to science, for example, because he couldn’t get

into medical school when he was younger and he thought

that in death he might do what he had proven unable to

do in life—put himself to good use in a medical school.

But the medical school in which he ended up probably did

not put his body to good use. How do we know this? Be-

cause the vast majority of medical school cadavers are

used to teach students what is already known rather than

to make new discoveries. The vast majority of cadavers

are used for Middle Age science.

In many college anatomy classes, dead animals are

handed out to students. A teaching assistant, perhaps

overworked, underpaid, or poorly equipped for the role,

discusses how the dissection should be done. Students

perform various forms of butchery. Students label, identi-

fy, or remove the parts of the body on which the teaching

assistant has told them to focus. The students are told, at

least generally, how said body part works. More body

parts are dissected. More knowledge is provided. The

bodies are then thrown away in special trashcans. The

students and instructors alike go home, thinking of job

applications, other classes, a love interest, or happy hour.

The whole process repeats itself with a new group the

next morning. This is funny because it is the way nearly

everyone who has taken a biology class learned anatomy.

Teaching Students How to Discover the Unknown

65

If you took a more advanced anatomy class it was likely

distinguished only by the larger diversity of things into

which you cut.

We don’t mean to minimize the hard work of students

or teaching assistants. What we are criticizing, however, is

that we seem to largely teach anatomy in exactly the same

way that it was being taught at the end of the Middle Ag-

es. Specifically, students look at bodies of animals, but are

not encouraged in any way to make real observations.

Instead, they are instructed to look for what is already

known and then if it does not look quite right, depict it the

way it “should” look. Where differences among bodies are

noted, they are seldom measured. Even when measure-

ments are taken, they are seldom recorded.

Now, you might think we are confusing things. At the

end of the Middle Ages we were ignorant about the body.

Simple measurements could produce new knowledge.

Now we understand the body. Of course, you are right to

note that difference—or you would be, except that we still

don’t understand the bodies of animals very well. The

function of the appendix is under new scrutiny, for exam-

ple, as is the stomach. In fact, when it comes to basic mor-

phology, the sorts of things that can be measured by

students in large classes, we haven’t made much progress

in the last hundred years.

How and why do intestines vary among individuals?

How frequent are different deformations of particular or-

gans? Are there tradeoffs between investment in one or-

gan and in another? How common are rare or poorly

understood mutations in the bodies of cats, pigs, or even

humans? Such mutations are hard to study because of

their rarity, but we dissect so many pigs, cats, and other

animals that even something that occurs in just one in a

million animals turns up somewhere in some class each

year. What else could be studied? There are potential dis-

coveries right beneath students as they look up at their

Dunn & Menninger

66

teaching assistants or teachers, but we are training stu-

dents to ignore them, to see the general story at the ex-

pense of the truth.

It is not only in dissections and anatomy where we still

teach in this antiquated way. Walk into an elementary

school, a middle school, or a high school and you’ll note

that lessons based on demonstration science are the norm

in K-12 education, not the exception. Consider, for in-

stance, the carnation and food coloring experiment, the

bean in the jar, or combining chemicals A and B to pro-

duce puffs of smoke. In fact, demonstration science is so

much the norm that we don’t even call it demonstration

science, we just call it science education.

In our view, this typical approach to science education

is not only out of date—it’s broken. If this seems harsh, it’s

because we mistakenly assume that the world is mostly

known and understood. In truth, much of the world is not

nearly as well understood as we’d like to believe. To take

a simple example, most species on Earth have yet to be

named; until species are discovered, documented, and

named, we can’t really know anything else about them. By

extension, therefore, we know precious little about most

of life. If we are going to train generations of students to

help us understand this unknown life, this unknown

world, we must do better than Middle Ages science edu-

cation. Thanks to teachers, we are starting to.

For the last four years, we have developed Your Wild

Life (yourwildlife.org) as a program that engages the pub-

lic in the study of the biodiversity in their daily lives. We

work in homes, backyards, neighborhoods, museums, and

science centers. We ask the public to do wacky things like

twirl a Q-tip in their belly buttons to collect microbes in-

side their navels; set out cookie crumbs as bait to collect

ants; and take pictures of spirited, leggy crickets hopping

around their basements. These citizen scientists make im-

portant observations and contribute data to authentic sci-

Teaching Students How to Discover the Unknown

67

entific research. And then they go further. We encourage

them (through social media and our blog) to participate in

the whole process of science—analyzing the data, making

novel insights, developing new hypotheses, and collec-

tively determining where we as a public science research

team should take the research next. In this sense, our pro-

jects push the boundaries of typical models assigned to

citizen science projects.

Initially, our work—led by a team of scientists and sci-

ence communicators—was situated squarely within the

domain of informal science education. We sought the par-

ticipation of the public (be they eight or 80 years old, sin-

gle volunteers or entire families) in their free time, outside

of the science classroom. For our earliest projects—Belly

Button Biodiversity and School of Ants, which focused on

documenting the diversity of microbes in our belly but-

tons and ants in our backyards, respectively—we part-

nered with the North Carolina Museum of Natural

Sciences, our state natural history museum, to recruit par-

ticipants and collect data at Museum-sponsored outreach

events.

Over time, as our online presence and the number of

Your Wild Life projects grew, our audience and partici-

pant base expanded widely. For example, for Wild Life of

Our Homes, an investigation of microbial biodiversity on

the surfaces in our homes, we recruited over 1,400 partici-

pating households, representing every American state and

the District of Columbia. We are now a sort of digital mu-

seum of public science ourselves.

It was no surprise, therefore, that some inspired and

persistent teachers, those practitioners of formal science

education, took notice. They reached out to us and in-

quired about lesson plans to accompany our citizen sci-

ence projects. These teachers wanted to abandon the

carnations and the baking soda volcanoes in order to

bring real scientific research to their classrooms. At the

Dunn & Menninger

68

time, we had neither the content nor the expertise for cre-

ating such things.

So we embarked on developing a couple lesson plans

based on Belly Button Biodiversity and School of Ants, but

there was a problem. We didn’t really know how to make

lesson plans that would support the required curriculum

standards and the teachers. In particular, many teachers

weren’t fully comfortable with science, particularly sci-

ence where the answers remained unknown. In other

words, the teachers couldn’t pull together citizen science

lesson plans on their own, and neither could we. We

needed each other and we needed to work together, itera-

tively, to produce lessons in which the goal was not to

reveal what we already know, but instead, create new

knowledge. Because scientists have been largely avoiding

K-12 education for the last five hundred years and teach-

ers have mostly been avoiding science, the rift between

our perspectives and fields was, at times, large. What

seemed easy became both hard and interesting.

We persevered and our early efforts are now available

for download at studentsdiscover.org. A lingering issue

from this exercise was how to scale up our successes from

the first few classrooms. This is the stage at which we

caught a lucky break. A coalition of education researchers

and experts in teacher professional development brought

us in as partners on a large, ambitious project. Wouldn’t it

be great, we collectively thought, to use citizen science as a

means for engaging students across North Carolina and beyond

in authentic research, to create opportunities for middle school

students to make real scientific discoveries?

Our project, “Students Discover: Improving Middle

School STEM Outcomes through Scaling Citizen Science

Projects,” was funded by the National Science Foundation

in 2013 and hit the ground running with its first cohort of

middle school teachers in July, 2014. Rather than apply a

lesson plan framework to pre-existing citizen science pro-

Teaching Students How to Discover the Unknown

69

jects (as so often is the norm), Students Discover tries to

flip the model. We partner early-career scientists with

middle school teachers to co-create citizen science projects

and associated lesson plans aligned to both state and na-

tional standards. We aim to bring real research—by which

we mean novel and authentic question-driven research—

to each participating classroom. We envision teachers and

students transforming from observers and recorders to

research collaborators and co-investigators, studying the

ecology and evolution of species in our daily lives.

In its first year, the Students Discover scientist-teacher

teams co-created projects that studied the tiny mites that

live on our faces, the beneficial soil microbes that help a

common weed thrive, fossilized shark teeth in ancient

ocean deposits, and mammal diversity in urban habitats.

In the second year, projects were added on backyard ants

and their pathogens. In addition, we began to develop

lesson plans for one hundred additional citizen science

projects, with the goal of providing teachers access to as

many projects as possible. These projects are now being

implemented in classrooms across North Carolina, and

the first pieces of student-generated data and discovery

are rolling in.

The act of co-creation is time-consuming, labor-

intensive, and messy, much like the process of science it-

self. Yet we think the payoffs, if we can achieve them—

deep changes in teacher knowledge and instructional

practice, increased student engagement in science learn-

ing, and improved science achievement—will be totally

worth it. We will not stop working until real science—

investigations where the answers are neither known nor

predetermined—becomes the norm in the middle school

science classroom.

And as for the dissections? We aren’t quite there yet,

but we have an idea of what could be done. We would

have students take real measurements along with high-

Dunn & Menninger

70

resolution digital images of the animals, including hu-

mans, that they dissect. They would also take a tissue

sample of each animal (this might need to occur before the

animals were preserved, which would be harder, but pos-

sible). The images and measurements would be sent to a

database where they could be compared with other sam-

ples of the same species, and the tissue would be shipped

to a tissue bank. With the database, anyone could com-

pare the features of animals to understand how much they

vary. With the tissue bank, the genes associated with unu-

sual features could be identified.

Citizen science has the potential to transform the class-

room experience, shifting students from passively receiv-

ing knowledge to being active partners in a process of

learning and discovery. With every moment in class, the

students conducting dissections would be reminded that

the body they are looking at is, like their own body, still

imperfectly understood. This revelation—of the incom-

pleteness of knowledge, and the role of students and

teachers alike in advancing knowledge—took until the

late Renaissance to discover. It is a discovery we would do

well to build on as we consider how our own science and

education might, together, be reborn.

Further Reading

Barberán, A., Dunn, R. R., Reich, B. J., Pacifici, K., Laber, E.

B., Menninger, H. L., Morton, J. M., Henley, J. B., Leff,

J. W., Miller, S. L., & Fierer, N. (2015). “The ecology of

microscopic life in household dust.” Proceedings of Roy-

al Society B 282(1814): DOI 10.1098/rspb.2015.1139.

Beasley, D. E., Koltz, A. M., Lambert, J. E., Fierer, N., &

Dunn, R. R. (2015). “The evolution of stomach acidity

and its relevance to the human microbiome.” PLoS

ONE 10(7): e0134116. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.

0134116

Teaching Students How to Discover the Unknown

71

Bollinger, R. R., Barbas, A. S., Bush, E. L., Lin, S. S., & Par-

ker, W. (2007). “Biofilms in the large bowel suggest an

apparent function of the human vermiform appendix.”

Journal of Theoretical Biology 249(4): 826-831.

Bonney, R., Ballard, H., Jordan, R., McCallie, E., Phillips,

T., Shirk, J., & Wilderman, C. C. (2009). Public Participa-

tion in Scientific Research: Defining the Field and Assessing

Its Potential for Informal Science Education. A CAISE In-

quiry Group Report. Washington, DC: Center for Ad-

vancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE).

Dunn, R. (2015). The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True

Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery. New York, NY:

Little, Brown.

Elizondo-Omaña, R. E., Guzmán-López, S., & De Los An-

geles García-Rodríguez, M. (2005). “Dissection as a

teaching tool: Past, present, and future.” The Anatomical

Record 285B: 11-15. DOI 10.1002/ar.b.20070

King, L. A., Ross, C. L., Stephens, M. L., & Rowan, A. N.

(2004). “Biology teachers’ attitudes to dissection and al-

ternatives.” Alternatives to Laboratory Animals 32(1):

475-484.

Oakley, J. (2012). “Science teachers and the dissection de-

bate: Perspectives on animal dissection and alterna-

tives.” International Journal of Environmental & Science

Education 7(2): 253-267.

PART TWO

75

4

WHEN CITIZEN SCIENCE MAKES THE

NEWS

Lily Bui

Broadcasting, believe it or not, comes from farming.

In modern vernacular, “to broadcast” means to trans-

mit information by TV or radio, but the verb’s original

definition meant “to scatter [seeds] by hand or machine

rather than placing in drills or rows.” It may come as a

surprise to you that broadcasting has just as much to do

with farming and media as it has to do with citizen sci-

ence.

In 1792, Robert B. Thomas started the Old Farmers’ Al-

manac, a periodical circulated widely and regularly to

farmers. Still in publication today, the Almanac serves two

important purposes. First, it acts as an objective reference

for weather and astronomical predictions, sourcing its

observations from the farming community. Second, it fa-

cilitates a space where the community can share advice,

anecdotes, recipes, and more with each other. But what

does this have to do with citizen science?

If you’ve made it this far into the book, you have prob-

ably formed an impression of what citizen science is. For

the purposes of this chapter, we’ll think of citizen science

Bui

76

as public involvement in inquiry, discovery, and construc-

tion of scientific knowledge, typically in the form of data

collection, classification, or documentation.

Conceptually, the Almanac is not far from how some

citizen science efforts are built: it incorporates public

knowledge into a larger corpus of information predicated

on a scientific question. Also, the Almanac illustrates an-

other important concept—that citizen science does not

happen in a vacuum. Citizen science inherently cultivates

community, and we can conjecture from the Almanac that

communities often need a means of communicating with

themselves and with each other. And that, dear reader, is

where media comes in.

The Role of Media in Citizen Science

When I say “media,” I’m referring to processes that fa-

cilitate the documentation, reporting, or construction of

information. In this chapter, I’ll use examples of “mass

media” (TV, radio, major news outlets) and what I’ll call

“micromedia” (blogs, social media, etc.) in both digital

and non-digital contexts. You’ll see quickly, however, that

the lines between both distinctions blur very quickly and

very easily.

But before we dive into the purpose of media in citizen

science, it’s important first to discuss the purpose of me-

dia in science proper. When I first set out to do research

for writing this chapter, my literature scan for publica-

tions about “purpose” and “media” and “science” ren-

dered results about journalism and public relations. This

seems like the perfect locus at which to begin our conver-

sation.

In Journalism, Science, and Society, editors Martin W.

Bauer and Massimiano Buchi bring together voices that

provide a critical view of science and media. As one of

When Citizen Science Makes the News

77

those voices, Tim Radford, the former science editor of the

Guardian, identifies “a crucial tension in the focus of the

mass media—particularly papers—on seeking a good nar-

rative rather than seeking to advance public education as

scientists sometimes seem to expect.” In a separate chap-

ter, Claudio Pantarotto and Armanda Jori describe their

conversation with a biomedical company in which the

interviewee describes the company’s view on media:

“Communication has two strategic purposes: firstly, to

attract donations [...] secondly, to maintain the image and

reputation of the institute.”

These views beg excruciatingly essential questions: Is

science journalism, in effect, PR for science and scientists,

or is there a distinction between the two? If so, where is

the distinction? What—if anything—is the responsibility

of media in terms of public education and understanding

of science? How can media add value to the way the pub-

lic discovers, accesses, and consumes scientific infor-

mation?

The answers to these questions depend largely on how

you look at the role of media itself, which requires peeling

back an additional layer. Media theorist James W. Carey

presents two different models of communication that

might be useful in helping us think through this. One is a

“transmission model,” in which one party imparts infor-

mation to another, like in traditional broadcast TV and

radio. (This is also a typically unidirectional relationship

between media and people.) The other is a “ritualistic

model,” which is defined by things like sharing, participa-

tion, association, and fellowship. Based on what we know

about citizen science and its collaborative involvement of

the public, Carey’s ritualistic view of communication

seems to lay along the line of best fit.

While traditional media relies on transmission (e.g., a

large newspaper prints a cover story and distributes it to

the masses), I propose that citizen science media could

Bui

78

and should shift toward the ritualistic model (e.g., many

disparate sources collaboratively construct the universe of

citizen science media) to raise public awareness about sci-

ence; induct participants in citizen science projects; and

close the feedback loop between the public, scientists, and

media outlets.

The Current Citizen Science Mediascape

In very broad terms, there are several forms of “media

about citizen science” that have crystallized in recent

years:

•Media reporting on citizen science as a field/practice;

•Citizen scientists producing media about their partici-

pation in projects; and

•Scientists and researchers writing about citizen science

(both within and outside of academic publishing).

The largest volume of citizen science media content likely

resides in the latter two categories. Let’s begin, however,

with the first, which is essentially mass media’s modus

operandi.

Mass Media

At the time of writing this, you can count on one hand

the number of mainstream media outlets that regularly

produce content about citizen science: National Geograph-

ic’s Citizen Science Education initiatives, Discover Maga-

zine’s Citizen Science Salon, and Scientific American’s

Citizen Science blog.

These publications play important roles in raising

awareness about citizen science. Articles and blog posts

capture opportunities to participate in projects, research

findings and results, and interviews with project manag-

ers and scientists. Some publications are restricted to one

When Citizen Science Makes the News

79

channel of delivery (either print or online), whereas oth-

ers, like Discover Magazine’s Citizen Science Salon (a

SciStarter project), are cross-platform, spanning both print

and digital.

The important thing to note, though, is that in most

cases, mass media outlets are reporting on citizen science

and transmitting information one way. Although it is pos-

sible for audiences to give feedback in the form of online

comments or writing to the editors, the nodes in this mod-

el rarely extend beyond the reader and the media outlet

itself. Then participating in the citizen science projects that

these media report on usually requires navigating away to

that particular project page, a process that is disconnected

from the medium through which the original story was

received.

Figure 1: Traditional Model of Science Media

Bui

80

As yet, there is no such thing as a regular citizen sci-

ence segment on television (in news or any other genre).

Radio may be ahead of the curve, though, which I’ll dis-

cuss in a separate section ahead.

Micromedia

Meanwhile, there has been an emergence of citizen sci-

ence micromedia produced by non-professionals for

smaller audiences. This mostly occurs online on blogging

and social media platforms, and stems from a trend in the

broader science journalism community, which strives to

fuse a more direct and effective connection between scien-

tists and the public.

In the blogosphere, sites like SciStarter and the Public

Library of Science’s (PLOS) CitizenSci blog produce regu-

lar stories about citizen science research, often authored

by scientists, citizen scientists, educators, policy research-

ers, and others. SciStarter links readers directly to projects,

which are organized in its database of hundreds of citizen

science projects. The site also connects projects and project

managers directly to media through various media part-

nerships. PLOS CitizenSci connects readers to citizen sci-

ence projects and science papers. On PLOS CitizenSci,

Caren Cooper, the Assistant Director of the Biodiversity

Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural

Sciences and former Cornell Ornithology Lab researcher,

writes the “CitizenSci Scoop,” a weekly blog series that

highlights a host of topics in citizen science history and

research.

Some citizen science platforms provide a forum in

which participants convene and discuss projects. The ex-

changes in these forums can also be seen as a production

of media or documentation. For example, the Zooniverse

citizen science platform hosts a plethora of citizen science

projects for fields spanning astronomy to climatology to

archaeology. Each project has its own Talk site, where par-

When Citizen Science Makes the News

81

ticipants can talk to both each other and to scientists lead-

ing the projects, in case anyone needs clarification on how

a project is running.

Public Lab, an open-source science community that fo-

cuses on the development of low-cost and low-tech sensor

tools, encourages members of its community to contribute

research notes to the Wiki-based site to document devel-

opment, testing, and ideation efforts. The research notes

are a cross between a blog post and scientific paper, which

other members of the Public Lab community can com-

ment on, share, etc. The notes can also be posted by any-

one and everyone in the community.

Media also get produced for citizen science projects.

#SnowTweets, a citizen science project that focuses on

cryosphere research, asks citizen scientists to tweet obser-

vations of snowfall (even if there is zero snowfall). Their

team then scrapes Twitter for these observations and uses

the data for analysis. Project NOAH and iNaturalist are

nature observation citizen science projects that invite par-

ticipants to submit photographs of species sightings to

their website.

Although no single source of micromedia reaches as

many people as mass media can reach at a given time, the

aggregate of all citizen science micromedia provides a

more robust and representative view of what is actually

happening within citizen science. Stakeholders should

foster a multi-pronged approach to constructing the citi-

zen science media discourse, and one camp that is accom-

plishing this very well is public media.

“Public media,” as opposed to commercial media, re-

fers to any media disseminated by or supported by a pub-

lic broadcasting station or entity (e.g., PBS, NPR, BBC,

etc.). Before I proceed, let’s get one thing straight: I am an

unabashed public media nerd. You also know by now that

I am an advocate for citizen science. Despite my embed-

Bui

82

ded biases, however, the convergence of these two worlds

speaks to a much larger narrative—that of citizen science

as a form of public participation in science and public me-

dia as a forum for public discourse.

Figure 2: Proposed Model for Citizen Science Media

Public Media, Public Science

Here are some basic reasons why collaborations be-

tween citizen science and public media might be success-

ful and even flourish:

Shared mission. Public media is a mission-driven indus-

try with its roots in public education and pedagogy,

which aligns with the many citizen science projects

that offer educational value by design. Both public

When Citizen Science Makes the News

83

media and citizen science also seek to raise awareness

about relevant issues and to engage people beyond

consuming information alone.

National and local interests. Citizen science projects can

illuminate very local issues (e.g., a dwindling frog

population in southern Illinois) as well as national is-

sues (e.g., climate change), while providing a means to

engage with these problems. Public media often covers

national and local issues, which can be aligned with

relevant citizen science projects that advance a related

field of research.

Infrastructure. Public media already has the infrastruc-

ture for disseminating content on air and online. Its or-

ganizing principle is also to create symbolic and

material communities around public media content.

Most citizen science projects constantly seek more par-

ticipants and opportunities to build communities

around citizen science.

Volunteerism. The heart of citizen science is the spirit of

volunteerism, and many public media stations operate

with the same credo. A citizen science project cannot

be successful without volunteers to help collect data,

and many public media stations rely on their volunteer

networks to run events, promote programming, and in

some cases even create content.

Believe it or not, public media and citizen science have

already met and hung out, with many case studies un-

derway (and an alphabet soup of station call signs to

boot).

WHYY’s The Pulse

Every few weeks, through a partnership between

WHYY and SciStarter, producer Kimberly Haas features a

citizen science project with some kind of connection in the

Philadelphia area, the radio station’s broadcast region. She

Bui

84

interviews project managers, volunteers, and researchers

about their work and encourages listeners to participate in

the projects as long as the projects are active. These stories

match with seasonal considerations. For example, a previ-

ous winter segment featured a citizen project called Tiny

Terrors, which focuses on identifying the invasive woody

adelgid. The story was framed by the context of winter in

the Northeast, where the types of trees susceptible to the

woody adelgid grow. The Pulse also runs stories on many

Further Reading

Barrett, D. & Leddy, S. (2008). “Assessing Creative Me-

dia’s Social Impact.” White paper, The Fledgling Fund.

Bauer, M. W. & Buchi, M., eds. (2007). Journalism, Science

and Society: Science Communication between News and

Public Relations. New York, NY: Routledge.

Brumfiel, G. (2009). “Science journalism: Supplanting the

old media?” Nature 458: 274-277.

Carey, J. W. (1989). “A Cultural Approach to Communica-

tion.” In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and

Society. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

Lewis, C. & Niles, H. (2013). “Measuring Impact: The Art,

Science, and Mystery of Nonprofit News.” Washing-

ton, DC: American University School of Education.

Lowe, G. F. & Martin, F., eds. (2013). The Value of Public

Service Media. RIPE@2013. Goteberg, Sweden: Nor-

dicom.

Walsh, L. (2010). “The Common Topoi of STEM Dis-

course: An Apologia and Methodological Proposal,

With Pilot Survey.” SAGE Publications.

89

5

SOCIAL MOVEMENT-BASED CITIZEN

SCIENCE

Gwen Ottinger

On October 30, 2014, a coalition of environmental and

community groups released a report entitled Warning

Signs: Toxic Air Pollution at Oil and Gas Development Sites.

Warning Signs reported on air sampling conducted by res-

idents of communities in six states affected by hydraulic

fracturing (fracking) and natural gas production activities.

It integrated technical details of monitoring protocols and

sampling results with first-hand accounts of the impacts

of fracking on communities, resulting in an argument for

expanded air monitoring by environmental regulatory

agencies, full disclosure by natural gas companies of the

chemicals used in natural gas production, and a “precau-

tionary approach” to regulating the industry. The report

was released on the same day that a peer-reviewed article

about the study appeared in the journal Environmental

Health. While the journal article did not include communi-

ty voices directly, it defended the value of community-

based monitoring and recommended including residents’

participation in expanded government monitoring pro-

grams.

Ottinger

90

The well publicized, multi-community study is an ex-

ample, on a grand scale, of one of two major variants of

citizen science, described by Caren Cooper and Bruce

Lewenstein as “democratic,” in that it “address[es] the

needs and concerns of citizens” and is “developed and

enacted by citizens themselves” (p. 54). In contrast to

Cooper and Lewenstein, this chapter argues that efforts

like Warning Signs and AIDS treatment activists’ work to

change protocols for clinical trials are better characterized

by their connections with larger political projects under-

taken by what are known as “social movements.” Social

movements mobilize large numbers of people and organi-

zations to raise an issue to prominence, change the way

we think about it, and affect policy on the issue. In social

movement-based citizen science, activist groups design

studies not only to improve knowledge but to foster col-

lective action and political change. Growing out of the

environmental justice movement, the Warning Signs study

brought together far-flung communities affected by un-

conventional oil and gas production to document the ex-

tent of the effects, highlight the government agencies’

inattention to the problems, and further calls for stricter

regulatory oversight.

Although few social movement-based citizen science

projects are as extensive as the Warning Signs study, it

nonetheless exemplifies several defining characteristics of

this form of citizen science:

•Research questions grow directly out of the questions

and concerns of citizen scientists;

•Credentialed scientists participate as allies, providing

resources and advice without driving the research;

•Activists use innovative methods, including “do-it-

yourself” (DIY) instruments;

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

91

• Questions and methods implicitly or explicitly chal-

lenge the adequacy of standard scientific approaches;

and, as a result,

• Social movement groups engaged in citizen science

face tradeoffs between scientific legitimacy and politi-

cal efficacy.

Because social movement-based citizen science is by

definition political, it is often discounted or dismissed by

scientists concerned that it is not sufficiently objective to

make a reliable contribution to scientific knowledge; poli-

cymakers, similarly, may believe that it is not rigorous

enough to be responsibly used to inform policy. But its

politics should not disqualify it as a contribution to sci-

ence or policy. On the contrary, given that value judg-

ments are inevitable in all scientific investigations, the

explicitly political nature of citizen science grounded in

social movements suggests ways that all forms of citizen

science—and science in general—could become more ro-

bust by being more transparent and more deliberate about

their own values. Furthermore, by diversifying the values

that inform scientific inquiry, social movement-based citi-

zen science can help scientists identify fruitful new meth-

ods and avenues of investigation.

Research Questions Are Community Questions

The first-hand accounts featured in Warning Signs

make it clear that the health effects of natural gas produc-

tion are of particular concern to nearby communities. In

testimony after testimony, residents not only describe the

symptoms they have experienced, they posit a connection

between ill health and chemical smells. Caitlin Kennedy of

Clark, Wyoming, for example, describes her experience:

“It smelled like someone had turned a stove on without

the pilot light on. I immediately got a headache, my nose

Ottinger

92

started burning and I felt lightheaded.” Similarly, in Pavil-

lion, Wyoming, John Fenton reports “feeling tightness in

my chest, nausea, throat irritation,” and a number of other

symptoms after being “overcome by a sickly sweet odor

and an acid-like metallic taste.”

Accordingly, the study is designed to probe the hy-

pothesized connection between exposure to chemicals

from natural gas production and illness. Its two research

questions, “Are community members, workers, and ani-

mals being exposed to harmful airborne chemicals from

fracking and other production activities?” and “Do the

known health effects of those chemicals give cause for

concern?” seek first to establish the presence in communi-

ties like Clark and Pavillion of chemicals that could cause

illness, and then to connect them to potential health ef-

fects. The study’s methods are also closely tied to the way

that residents experience pollution: air samples were tak-

en in places where community members had consistently

noticed chemical smells or experienced health effects.

The defining role that citizen scientists’ questions play

in the Warning Signs study makes the project typical of

social movement-based citizen science more generally.

Their questions, moreover, are not motivated by curiosity

alone; rather, they arise from local experiences that sug-

gest a larger problem. In his study of a community-

initiated health study in Woburn, Massachusetts—a

common type of social movement-based citizen science

known as “popular epidemiology”—sociologist Phil

Brown describes the process of creating such projects as

starting when individuals begin to notice both pollutants

and health effects in their community; it continues with

their hypothesizing a connection between the two and

setting out to probe that connection.

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

93

Scientists Are Allies

Although citizen scientists define the research ques-

tions based on their experiences and observations, creden-

tialed scientists still participate in social movement-based

projects. The environmental groups leading the Warning

Signs study recruited scientists to the project early on, ask-

ing them to review the monitoring protocol and help in-

terpret data. The participation of scientists was also

crucial in getting the study accepted to a peer-reviewed

journal, although community leaders also routinely call on

scientists even when they do not aspire to produce an ac-

ademic publication. In Louisiana, communities that use

bucket air samplers in their local campaigns, for example,

ask local chemist Wilma Subra to put sample results in the

context of reported releases from nearby petrochemical

facilities.

Credentialed scientists play two important roles in so-

cial movement-based citizen science. First, they can im-

prove study design, by helping citizen scientists make

sure the methods that they’ve chosen are well suited to

the questions they want to answer. In the Warning Signs

study, the research team knew that they wanted to test air

quality near compressor stations and had imagined using

bucket air samplers to do so. Allied scientists, however,

suggested that they would need a different instrument to

measure the pollution they were interested in, so the

study was modified to include monitoring with formalde-

hyde badges at those sites.

Scientists’ involvement can also increase the legitimacy

of science produced by activist groups. It can facilitate

publication in peer-reviewed journals and coordination

with regulatory standards, both widely accepted markers

of scientific credibility. As spokespeople for social move-

ment-based projects, scientists help increase the likelihood

that decision makers will take citizen scientists’ results

seriously, by presenting the results from an authoritative,

Ottinger

94

external perspective (a process that sociologist Abby Kin-

chy calls the “epistemic boomerang”) and framing them in

the technocratic language used in regulatory proceedings.

When choosing scientists to work with, community

leaders are careful to find scientists supportive of their

goals and methods. Warning Signs researchers, for exam-

ple, looked for experts who not only could offer expertise

on oil and gas production but also would acknowledge

that community members themselves were well posi-

tioned to identify sampling sites and collect air samples.

The “expert-activists” who participate face the challenge

of protecting their scientific credibility while at the same

time helping social movement groups achieve their politi-

cal goals; in his research, sociologist Scott Frickel shows

how they do so by forming under-the-radar networks of

like-minded colleagues, which he calls “shadow mobiliza-

tions.”

Methods May Be “Hacked”

The Warning Signs study reported on results from air

monitoring conducted with “bucket” air samplers. The

buckets are a kind of “grab sampler”: they pull a volume

of air into a container that is then sent off to a laboratory

for analysis. Most grab sampling is done using a device

called a Summa canister. Summa canisters are stainless

steel spheres with a glass lining; they come from the lab

already evacuated, and the entire device has to be sent

back to the lab every time a sample is taken. Buckets, in

contrast, house a bag made of special, nonreactive plastic

called Tedlar in an ordinary paint bucket. Scientific-grade

tubing is used to connect a miniature vacuum cleaner,

available in consumer electronics stores, which evacuates

the bucket and allows air to flow into the bucket. Once a

sample has been taken, only the Tedlar bag has to be sent

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

95

to the lab; the rest of the device remains in the community

and can continue to be used.

Buckets are just one example of a scientific instrument

used by citizen scientists to replace a standard scientific

method or instrument with one that is more accessible to

ordinary people. Since 2010, many other such instruments

and techniques have been developed by members of an

organization called Public Lab. Their website (pub-

liclab.org) offers tools for measuring water quality, sens-

ing chemicals in indoor air, and creating aerial maps of

areas affected by pollution or natural disasters, to name

few.

These DIY monitoring techniques share a number of

characteristics. First, they are tailored to the questions of

citizen scientists. The bucket’s design, for example, is op-

timized for community concerns about very strong odors

from petrochemical facilities that might last under an

hour, but that might occur several days in a row. Buckets

accordingly have a sampling period of several minutes—

long enough not to miss the smell if the wind shifted for a

moment, but short enough not to dilute the worst smells

with cleaner air. The easily replaceable Tedlar bag allows

them to always be at the ready in the community, instead

of being unavailable while a sample is being analyzed, as

Summa canisters are.

The level of precision offered by DIY monitors is also

dictated by the questions and interests of users. Very

small concentrations of air toxins can be harmful to hu-

man health; as a result, bucket samples are analyzed using

a technique that can measure those chemicals at the parts

per billion (ppb) level. In contrast, an indoor air monitor

developed by Public Lab doesn’t take numerical readings

at all. Instead, it roams around a room, changing color

when chemicals are detected, allowing users to locate the

source(s) of hazardous chemicals in their homes.

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96

DIY instruments tend to be built by users. In bucket

trainings, community members build buckets together, in

addition to learning how to use them. Public Lab posts

parts lists and instructions on its website for the instru-

ments developed by members. Because of the hands-on

nature of these devices, innovations and improvements

also come from users. Buckets no longer use actual buck-

ets to house their sampling bag; instead, they use similarly

sized clear plastic storage containers commonly used for

bulk foods, a user-inspired modification that solves a

number of problems posed by the original design. This

kind of modification is actively encouraged by Public

Lab’s “open source” ethic, in which creators of a technol-

ogy don’t claim intellectual property rights but instead

make their creation freely available to others to use, modi-

fy, and distribute. Because they are constructed with read-

ily available parts and common household items, these

instruments also tend to be much less expensive than their

standard scientific counterparts: buckets cost under $100

to build, whereas Summa canisters cost $500 or more to

buy.

Scientific Critiques Are Central

Alternative instruments and methods should not be

seen as merely science on the cheap. Rather, they enable

another fundamental aspect of social movement-based

citizen science, that of critiquing the way that science is

ordinarily done and changing standard practices. Partici-

pants in the Warning Signs study took air samples near

fracking sites to call out scientists for their neglect of the

air quality impact of fracking in places where people live

and where children go to school. This criticism—that the

effects of petrochemical pollution on neighboring com-

munities are systematically neglected—is routinely lev-

eled at regulatory agencies by bucket users around the

world, with the effect that, nearly 20 years after buckets

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

97

were first developed, federal regulation now requires

fenceline monitoring at all U.S. oil refineries.

But citizen scientists don’t only want to push scientists

into doing research that is being left undone; they also

advocate for changes in scientific methods and standards

of evidence. In his work, the environmental health re-

searcher Phil Brown explains how popular epidemiology

challenges the ways that professional public health re-

searchers decide whether there is enough evidence to con-

clude that an environmental hazard is affecting people’s

health. The public health standard is to prefer false nega-

tives over false positives—that is, they choose to err on the

side of saying there is no problem when there is, rather

than take the risk of declaring that there is a problem

when there actually isn’t. They insist on a very high level

of statistical significance; they want to be 95% sure that

any elevated rates of disease that show up could not have

occurred randomly. Popular epidemiologists, in contrast,

argue that they should not have to meet these strict stand-

ards before the government will intervene to protect their

health, and they push for a more precautionary approach

with a lower bar for statistical significance.

Bucket users also challenge scientific standards for es-

tablishing what constitutes an environmental health prob-

lem. Environmental regulators take air samples over a 24-

hour period and compare them to health-based standards

set by the government for air quality, sometimes averag-

ing a whole year’s worth of samples to compare to an an-

nual average. Bucket users, working with individual 5-

minute samples, focus their analyses on chemicals fre-

quently detected by buckets and compare them directly to

whatever standards are available, whether they are for 8-

hour, 24-hour, or annual averages. In doing so, they high-

light the absence of any standards for some chemicals

known to affect human health; they point out the enor-

mous uncertainties in the standards, which can differ by

Ottinger

98

as much as ten or even 100 times from one set of agency

guidelines to another; and they assert that relatively short-

term exposures, not just long-term average exposures, can

directly impact people’s health.

Scientific Legitimacy Traded for Political Efficacy?

Despite their critique of standard scientific methods,

the citizen scientists involved in the Warning Signs study

made several moves to establish their scientific legitimacy.

They partnered with credentialed scientists and they pub-

lished their findings in a peer-reviewed journal as well as

in an activist report. Furthermore, the article and report

argue for the legitimacy of sampling results by drawing

on the authority of the U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA): both refer to the EPA federal reference

methods used to analyze samples, and the report de-

scribes how the sampling followed “stringent quality con-

trol protocols originally designed with EPA Region 9.”

Establishing scientific legitimacy is important for citi-

zen science to actually help bring about the changes that

social activists seek. Bucket results are taken seriously by

regulators, at least to a limited extent, because air samples

are analyzed in certified labs, using a method established

by the EPA. As a result, bucket samples showing very

high levels of chemicals can lead regulators to look for the

source of those elevated levels and compel facilities to

clean them up. Similarly, Shannon Dosemagen and other

founders of Public Lab report in an article that the partici-

patory mapping practices it helped foster in disaster-

affected communities were of great interest to internation-

al development agencies. These agencies use maps to

guide and organize their own, top-down activities, and

the agencies’ interest in geospatial data lent legitimacy to

community-generated maps.

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

99

Scientific legitimacy, however, may come at a cost:

where social movement-based citizen scientists align

themselves with expert practices for the sake of scientific

legitimacy, their critiques of standard scientific practices

are apt to get lost. International development agencies

insisted that Public Lab condense their work with com-

munities into very short time periods, attempting to im-

pose a standard view of mapping as a straightforward

technical procedure—undermining the organization’s

goal of fostering a deeply participatory practice that could

represent locals’ place-based knowledge. And bucket us-

ers’ desire to see regulators act on air quality data that

they collect has led them to push for more and more real-

time air monitoring, which offers the possibility to gener-

ate long-term averages—and the potential for scientists to

ignore the episodic peaks of pollution that buckets meas-

ure.

In conducting citizen science, then, social movement

groups must constantly make tradeoffs between increas-

ing the scientific authority of their claims and amplifying

their critiques of science as it is usually practiced. In her

book, Abby Kinchy shows the consequences of this

tradeoff very clearly in discussing two different communi-

ty-led approaches to showing that genetically modified

maize was finding its way into supposedly unmodified

maize through cross-pollination, contrary to seed compa-

ny scientists’ arguments that it would not happen. One of

the groups focused on genetic changes in the seeds, in

keeping with well-established science, which holds that it

is in the genes that any unintentional cross-breeding will

be visible. The other extended their investigations to look

at mutations in the plants themselves, taking seriously

locals’ implicit hypothesis that genetic cross-

contamination would be visible in the crop, but sacrificing

their credibility with scientists.

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100

Politics Don’t Detract from Contributions to Science

Because social movement-based citizen science pro-

duces knowledge with an explicit goal of creating social

change, critics charge it with “bias.” Even those who

might be sympathetic to citizen scientists’ causes are

tempted to regard their data gathering activities as politi-

cal, not scientific, endeavors. This view draws on the

widely held but erroneous belief that scientific investiga-

tions led by credentialed scientists are free of social val-

ues—except in anomalous cases involving corrupt

scientists.

In reality, no science is devoid of social values. Even

scientists who are scrupulously observing the standards in

their field and taking every precaution to ensure that their

personal desires or prejudices do not color their research

must still make numerous decisions about how to do their

work. What questions should they investigate? What

terms and metaphors should they use to talk about their

findings? Should they err on the side of seeing something

that isn’t there, or missing something that is? As philoso-

pher Kevin Elliot shows, values necessarily enter into all

of these decisions. Scientists should not be expected to

eradicate values from their research, although they should

of course be prohibited from manipulating data to suit

their political purposes. Instead, both Elliot and fellow

philosopher Heather Douglas believe that science would

be strengthened if scientists were to be more reflective and

transparent about their values. Doing so, they suggest,

would permit a more productive societal conversation

about the limitations of our knowledge, the implicit biases

that we might want to correct, and the alternative ways of

looking at things that might be more in keeping with our

shared values.

Viewed in this light, the explicitly political nature of

social movement-based projects can actually help make

science more robust and more responsive to social needs.

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

101

Unlike mainstream scientists, activists are transparent

about the values that inform their scientific activities. And

in their critiques of standard scientific practice, they call

attention to implicit value judgments being made by sci-

entists that might not seem appropriate when viewed

from other perspectives. The high level of statistical signif-

icance that epidemiologists insist on, for example, could

well be deemed unreasonable by a society that thought it

right to err on the side of caution when it came to protect-

ing people’s health.

Of course, just as there are cases where credentialed

scientists manipulate data to prove a point in which they

are personally or politically invested, there may be in-

stances in which social movement-based citizen scientists

manipulate data to serve their interests—and such behav-

ior is just as unacceptable in social movement-based citi-

zen science as it is in mainstream science. But it is also just

as anomalous. The political agendas of social movement

groups do not make them any more susceptible to corrup-

tion; if anything, citizen scientists who want to challenge

accepted approaches are likely to be even more committed

to making sure their methods are beyond reproach.

Responsibly conducted, the science conducted by ac-

tivist groups can make a contribution to scientific

knowledge writ large, not only by helping to amass data

that credentialed scientists do not or could not collect. It

can also diversify the values that inform scientific research

and prompt discussions of what values ought to be in-

forming scientific practice. By doing so, this kind of citizen

science could help to identify new and fruitful areas of

inquiry, and approaches to pursuing them that have the

potential to be of greater benefit to society.

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102

Summary

Social movement-based citizen science is characterized

by a number of features that distinguish it from citizen

science in which citizens participate in the research pro-

jects of academic scientists. It starts from citizen scientists’

questions and hypotheses, with credentialed experts play-

ing a supporting role. It invents alternatives to standard

scientific instruments and methods and, through its novel

approaches to community-based questions, critiques

mainstream science with an eye toward change. Activist

groups must decide how to trade off the political influ-

ence that comes with scientific legitimacy against their

ability to have their critiques recognized and responded to

in mainstream scientific practice. Finally, while running

the risk of being dismissed as “unscientific” for its explicit

political commitments, social movement-based projects

actually have the potential to strengthen scientific

knowledge by making the values inherent in all scientific

research more transparent, enabling those values to be

adjusted in keeping with societal needs and priorities.

Further Reading

Brown, P. (1992). “Popular Epidemiology and Toxic Waste

Contamination: Lay and Professional Ways of Know-

ing.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33: 267-281.

Coming Clean and Global Community Monitor (2014).

Warning Signs: Toxic Air Pollution Identified at Oil and

Gas Development Sites. http://comingcleaninc.org/

warningsigns

Dosemagen, S., Warren, J., & Wylie, S. (2011). “Grassroots

Mapping: Creating a Participatory Map-making Pro-

cess Centered on Discourse.” Journal of Aesthetics and

Protest 8.

Social Movement-Based Citizen Science

103

Douglas, H. (2009). Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal.

Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Elliot, K. (2011). Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press.

Kinchy, A. (2012). Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global

Politics of Transgenic Crops. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Macey, G. P., Breech, R., Chernaik, M., Cox, C., Larson, D.,

Thomas, D., & Carpenter, D. O. (2014). “Air Concentra-

tions of Volatile Compounds near Oil and Gas Produc-

tion: A Community-based Exploratory Study.”

Environmental Health 13: 82.

Ottinger, G. (2010). “Buckets of Resistance: Standards and

the Effectiveness of Citizen Science.” Science, Technolo-

gy, and Human Values 35: 244-270.

105

6

CITIZEN MICROBIOLOGY: A CASE

STUDY IN SPACE

David Coil

At 3:25 PM on April 18, 2014, I stood on the viewing

platform at Cape Canaveral, Florida, watching a massive

rocket carry a nationwide citizen science microbiology

project into space. This project would catalog hundreds of

types of bacteria living on the space station, survey thou-

sands more bacteria from participants around the country,

and measure the growth of common bacteria in space.

Mixed with the excitement and relief was a feeling of

amazement that we live in a time where such things are

possible. New and cheaper technology has completely

changed our understanding of microbiology in the last

decade or two. We can relatively cheaply ask questions

that weren’t even conceivable in the recent past. These

changes, along with rapidly growing public interest in

microbiology, have created the perfect conditions for an

explosion of what we call “citizen microbiology.” Our

project involving microbes in space is but one example of

this new and exciting field.

Over the last decade, microbiology has seen a renewed

surge of interest in popular media, books, and films.

Coil

106

While some of this relates to topics such as global pan-

demics and new diseases, increasing attention is being

paid to subjects like the importance of beneficial human-

associated microbes or the problem of antibiotic re-

sistance. Given the current level of public interest in both

microbiology and citizen science, it is perhaps no surprise

to hear that citizen microbiology is taking off. In this chap-

ter I’ll discuss the idea of citizen microbiology, the oppor-

tunities and challenges therein, a few examples, and one

detailed case study.

Before going into the details of citizen microbiology, a

few definitions might be in order. A “microbe” is tradi-

tionally defined as a living organism too small to be seen

with the naked eye. For our purposes this includes virus-

es, bacteria, fungi, and various other tiny creatures. “Mi-

crobiology” is the study of microbes and a “microbiome”

is the collection of microbes found in a particular habitat

(e.g., on a person or in a house).

A few microbiology citizen science projects that in-

volved culture-based monitoring (i.e., growing microbes

on plates in the lab) go back decades. For example, the

State of the Oyster project in Washington State has helped

volunteers monitor edible shellfish populations for harm-

ful bacteria since 1987. However, the ease and low cost of

DNA sequencing has been a major force for change. The

majority of citizen microbiology projects today are less

than ten years old, and rely in some way on cheap and

easy DNA sequencing. This sequencing allows researchers

to quickly and accurately identify most of the microbes in

a given sample.

Microbes are hard to see, often viewed negatively, and

have large impacts (good and bad) on human health.

These features create both opportunities and challenges in

conducting citizen microbiology.

Citizen Microbiology: A Case Study in Space

107

Opportunities & Challenges of Citizen Microbiology

Every human being carries a complex and unique col-

lection of microbes, making each person a valuable data

point in understanding the human microbiome. Given our

increasing understanding of the critical role played by

microbes in human health, this understanding may trans-

form numerous aspects of healthcare at an individual lev-

el. In addition to human-associated microbes, citizen

microbiology efforts involving environmental and water

monitoring can be extremely helpful in understanding

microbial ecology.

Beyond the scientific benefits, there is a tremendous

educational opportunity with microbiology. Many people

react negatively to words like “microbes” and “bacteria.”

It is far more common to find the term “germs” in the

media, usually portrayed in a health-influencing and neg-

ative way. Engaging the public through actually doing

microbiology provides an opening to discuss the fact that

microbes are everywhere, and the vast majority of them

are harmless or beneficial. Increased awareness of this fact

has important implications for human health, both direct-

ly (e.g., through reduced use of unnecessary antibiotics)

and indirectly (e.g., shifting away from “kill all the mi-

crobes” that is probably counterproductive for health).

Another opportunity with citizen microbiology is the

accessibility of samples: to get started all you often need is

a sterile swab. Citizen microbiology can also be adapted in

a hands-on manner in the classroom in a way that might

be difficult with, say, endangered birds. An excellent ex-

ample is the Phage Hunters project run by Graham Hat-

full at the University of Pittsburgh, where students

actually discover and characterize novel bacteriophages

(viruses that infect bacteria).

Citizen microbiology also presents a number of chal-

lenges, some of which are shared with other citizen sci-

Coil

108

ence projects but many of which are unique to, or more

problematic, when dealing with microbes. There is often,

for instance, a very strong negative association with mi-

crobiology and microbes. This is really both a challenge

and an opportunity, since educating the public about mi-

crobiology should be a primary goal of any citizen micro-

biology project. Many people are both surprised and

interested to learn how important microbes are to the

world around us and our own health. In our experience,

many times all that is needed is a couple examples of how

“germs” aren’t all bad to get people to be more open-

minded about microbiology.

The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science

Abstract and Figures