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A Collaborative Environment for Co-delivering Citizen Science Campaigns
Abstract
Campaigns in Citizen Science (CS) experiments are co-production processes where a wide range of diverse stakeholders must be coordinated to achieve a common societal or environmental purpose, i.e., generate evidence for the validation of a hypothesis. This work describes a Collaborative Environment (CE) to aid the co-design and co-delivery of CS campaigns.
... Governments are confronted with enormous challenges like urbanization [62] and the transformation toward sustainability due to climate change [42], which are affecting the way how we build and live [56]. As many authors describe, acceptable and feasible solutions that provide public value are required [48]. ...
... In on-site participation, moderators and immediate exchange support the reflection of needs and understanding, which enables compromises. In online participation, responses, if available, often lack this (ISS6) [1,4,14,15,17,18,41,42,48], but is highly relevant in one-sided discussions in which a popular opinion is shared without critical questioning and reflecting needs and individual situation (e. g. age, gender, wealth), which can be exhausting and time-consuming. If this is not noticed, discussion and whole participation can lack diversity in opinions and contributions (ISS7) [2,39,53], described by the cluster reflection. ...
Urbanization and the transformation toward sustainability pose new challenges to governments, leading to an increase in citizen participation in urban planning. Due to the demand for scalability, urban participation is often conducted online. However, past projects showed that the asynchronous and impersonal exchange reduces the value of citizens’ submissions as inquiries are omitted. Thus, this study investigates how to design an IT artifact to support citizens in contributing to online participation in urban planning projects. To do so, we initiated a design science research project. We analyzed the literature to define issues, formulate meta-requirements, and derive design principles to develop and qualitatively evaluate an AI-based prototype that enables immediate responses to citizens considering their contributions. This study contributes to the field of information systems with prescriptive knowledge. Furthermore, this study can guide practitioners in citizen participation in urban planning in building and utilizing digital tools to support citizens in contributing to subsequent processes.
Introduction:
Investigating how co-designed knowledge can be translated to co-produce a public health capacity-building solution for difficult-to-engage population groups drawing on the co-production experience of a prevention-focused, capacity-building mental health solution targeting primary producers.
Design:
A qualitative study undertaken in rural and regional Victoria involving members of the design working group including project team (7px), digital design team (5px), marketing team (3px), and funding partner representatives. The study design involved reflective practice to collect data to identify the phases of co-production and assess the design working group members' experiences. The analysis involved inductive coding using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis.
Objective:
Identifying major points of divergence and/or convergence; enablers and/or constraints; and ways to better navigate and strengthen the co-production process.
Finding:
Given members of the design working group, diverse skills sets divergence was experienced in all co-production phases. Divergence was also experienced between the project team and the funding partner given the uniqueness of working conditions and requirements of workers in the primary production industry. The project team applied an iterative development process to project management; encouraging iterative cycles to create/test/revise among the teams, and with the funding partner, until each was satisfied with the end result (convergence).
Discussion & conclusion:
When developing a co-created public health prevention campaign it is critical that the project team focuses on relationship building among the members of the design working group and ensures adequate resourcing, development of shared understanding of project goals and target audience, ongoing communication, and a commitment to working iteratively.
Co-production of public services is well known in the public management literature. Many studies show how co-production makes public services not only more efficient but also more effective. It the recent years, the development of several ICT applications and projects have shown that ICT has the potential to make co-production an easy and common practice for all citizens, changing completely how services are delivered on a large scale. The research, after having presented some existing cases of ICTs application that favorite co-production, shows that using ICT for co-production might help the state to deliver public services that generate Public Value. The paper follows with an in depth analysis according to the Actor Network Theory to understand if co-production through ICT might induce structural changes in the public administration allowing in future citizens to be actively involved in the production of public services. The research will conclude by providing a proposal to implement permanently co-production in the public sector.
In an era of wicked social problems, a smarter, more responsive, more efficient governance structure is necessary to take advantage of the enormous capability of the public to congregate, interact, and collaborate in finding solutions to intricate sociotechnical challenges. The bedrock for such a structure is open and shared information; the key to opening and sharing information lies in interagency information sharing and integration. With the objective to supplement previous research based on rich qualitative data, this study systematically identifies and tests some important determinants of the success of inter-organizational collaboration and information sharing initiatives through quantitative empirical analysis. Based on a national survey of government managers from two policy domains (criminal justice and public health) in the United States, this study found four statistically significant predictors of inter-organizational information sharing success. From those, we found compatibility of technical infrastructure and formally assigned project managers as the two most important predictors explaining the success of inter-organizational information sharing initiatives.
For over a century, citizen scientists have volunteered to collect huge quantities of data for professional scientists to analyze. We designed Pathfinder, an online environment that challenges this traditional division of labor by providing tools for citizen scientists to collaboratively discuss and analyze the data they collect. We evaluated Pathfinder in a sustainability and commuting context using a mixed methods approach in both naturalistic and experimental settings. Our results showed that citizen scientists preferred Pathfinder to a standard wiki and were able to go beyond data collection and engage in deeper discussion and analyses. We also found that citizen scientists require special types of technological support because they generate original research. This paper offers an early example of the mutually beneficial relationship between HCI and citizen science. Author Keywords Citizen science, online collaboration, online communities, social computing, social data analysis, sustainability, wiki.