Cyberscience by citizens
Late last year I was involved, through many different “jobs” with the Citizen Cyberscience Summit. This was an open meeting to bring together the people doing research and the members of the public that can help them. Citizen cyberscience is a wide ranging discipline but boils down to the general public being involved with real scientific research aided by technology.
That meeting had talks from Einstein@home, herbaria@home and even the UK Met Office. Yesterday however I was a super sekrit closed meeting for people across London (and Oxford) to discuss the opportunities for London/UK cyberscience centre. The meeting was actually in a similar mould to the one in September on a smaller scale and with presentations from some new projects. Thes include mapping happiness with iPhones, giving objects stories with QR codes and anthropological research with tribes in The Republic of the Congo and Cameroon using their specialist knowledge and technology to get them recognised by local and national government.
After the presentations were the group discussions on possible future directions of citizen cyberscience, likely future projects and getting more people (researchers as well as the general public) involved. I am usually a little wary of these sessions because they can go very badly if handled wrong but the 4/5 groups seemed to generate some great ideas and wander off into completely different areas covering a lot of ground.
Much like the summit in Spetember had 9 questions to answer which is being used to create a manifesto for the international body, the workshop hopes to use these discussions to create a document which can be used by the group in the future to really get citizen cyberscience moving in the capital.
