Institutional support and recognition of citizen and community science practices and researchers are important to underpin and ensure the success of these activities. However, in many research institutions, there are a variety of institutional barriers limiting the potential development, execution, and impact of such initiatives. At the same time, there are also opportunities. The idea of our Symposium was to provide an opportunity to share what we learned from understanding how RPOs can better support citizen and community science and to provide an opportunity for participants to share their experiences, and to continue and enhance our database of cases and activities.

We ran a Symposium Fishbowl and Workshop at the Citizen Science Association’s C*Sci conference in Phoenix, Arizona in May 2023 jointly with the INCENTIVE project. This Symposium built on everything we’ve done in the two projects as well as our previous joint Citizen Science Community Swap Shop webinar.

In the first fishbowl, we shared the experience of the RPOs with established support – what we can learn from their success, when taking into account their unique trajectories. In the second fishbowl after the Community Exchange Workshop part (see below), we had a session with ‘Implementers’ – those RPOs that are currently establishing support activities. This prompted participants who are at early stages to share their experience and current developments, challenges and successes. The fishbowl format, always with an empty inviting chair, ensured that Symposium participants had an opportunity to share their experiences as well – when the empty chair was taken, another ‘fish’ had to leave the circle, opening up a new empty chair.

In our Community Exchange Workshop (between fishbowls), we invited Symposium participants working with or in research institutions to co-develop a resource to enable institutional change to support long-term acceptance and embedding of citizen and community science practices within research institutions (e.g., universities, governmental or charitable research institutions). Many practitioners face similar institutional barriers and, in some instances, solutions have been found and could be shared.  

Some shared challenges identified included lack of recognition of or incentives for C*Sci efforts and outreach in science; time requirement; C*Sci not valued; funding. Some possible solutions suggested included sharing of success stories of citizen and community science; development of new methods of researcher assessment (beyond papers published); setting up local/regional institution and community partnerships and collaboration spaces; pipeline projects and building future research/project leaders from local communities.

Hear more about challenges and possible solutions and contribute your own at our next free webinar on June 27th at 2-3:30 pm CEST – where we will again be asking for your input, so please join the discussion then!

The final co-created resource will be freely available and shared widely, including on EU-citizen.science and on our project websites.

Read more on the TIME4CS homepage