Project description
Transforming research and societies with the aid of citizens
Citizen science is a broad term that encompasses that part of open science where citizens can participate in the scientific process in a variety of ways: by observing, analysing or producing data. Being pivotal to the democratisation of science, citizen science requires an adequate framework to function properly and to engage the public and stakeholders as much as possible. The EU-funded INCENTIVE project aims to support Europe’s research performing and funding organisations (RPFOs) in establishing sustainable transdisciplinary hubs for stimulating and supporting excellent citizen science. Besides being a sustainable institutional change themselves, citizen science hubs will serve as a vehicle for introducing considerable institutional changes in European RPFOs and their communities.
Objective
Europe’s Research Performing and Funding Organisations (RPFOs) have a crucial role to play as agents of institutional change towards firmly grounding RRI in our society. The successful fulfilment of this challenging yet highly significant role calls for the values of RRI to be well-embedded into their governance as well as their operation with greater and more systematic participation of citizens and all R&I stakeholders. INCENTIVE is set on empowering European RPFOs to establish sustainable transdisciplinary hubs for stimulating and supporting excellent citizen science with engaged roles for all R&I stakeholders in line with RRI principles. To this end, we start by establishing and demonstrating the potential of such Citizen Science Hubs in 4 world class RPFOs covering all 4 MoRRI Country Clusters, including University of Twente (NL), Autonomous University of Barcelona (ES), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (EL) and Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (LT). We tailor the governance and operating models of their hubs to their unique institutional specificities and regional ecosystems of R&I stakeholders, before putting them to the test to drive institutional change through a series of RRI-grounding actions conducted with and for society (citizen science, co-creation of public policies, R&I agenda setting, etc.). All in all, our Citizen Science Hubs, besides being a sustainable institutional change themselves, will serve as a vehicle for introducing substantial institutional changes in our RPFOs and their communities. We will closely monitor, evaluate and report the performance and outcomes of our Citizen Science Hubs and their actions, providing evidence of societal, democratic, economic and scientific impacts. Along the way, we will foster mutual learning and networking opportunities amongst RPFOs across Europe to share our experiences and develop practical tools to enable RPFOs to drive similar institutional changes in other contexts.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- H2020-EU.5. - SCIENCE WITH AND FOR SOCIETY Main Programme
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-SwafS-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-SwafS-2020-1
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
7522 NB Enschede
Netherlands