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June 29, 2007

Reflections on the Citizen Science Conference

Reflections on the Citizen Science Conference

I really enjoyed the conference. I got the chance to meet some really wonderful people and learned that there are countless cases of citizen science happening, on a number of different fronts. It was a jam-packed three days, and yet there was tremendous energy in the closing session. I hope that we'll find a way to carry that energy into the future.

Here are some general thoughts and reflections inspired by the conference:

I was really impressed by the Canadian groups that were represented; they're doing a great deal of monitoring AND they're working hard to affect government policy with the results. When they talk about going to local meetings with officials, there's a lack of adversarial tone that really struck me...they seem to think of those officials as fellow members of the community who will be as interested in doing good for that community as they are. What a concept!

There seemed to be some energy behind defining "monitoring" vs. "research" (and maybe "inventory"). It made me wonder what the real differences behind that were...does having a different orientation with respect to goals mean using different protocols? To me it seems like difference of what I learned as "pure science" and "applied science"...pure science perhaps asks the question "what don't we know?" where applied science asks all the other questions. Pure science would be going out every day and recording what you see, where applied science would be going out every day and testing nest boxes to see which ones the birds in your area preferred.

When it comes to applied citizen science, I do wonder where the line is drawn. I may have an overly simplistic view of what I think of as "science"...if you think that a power plant next to the lake is causing environmental problems, and you design a citizen science project to "prove" that, are you really doing science? There are slippery slopes, everywhere. As citizen scientists, we must speak up when we see a project touting itself as "science" when it's really a marketing effort for a cause, even if we might approve of the cause itself. I myself have avoided this conflict in the past, but I realize now that I can't. Credibility is a problem, and we contribute to it if we stay silent about work that isn't credible.

You can't talk about citizen science without the conversation eventually getting around to defining the term itself. Some people think that a citizen science project is possible only with an organized group of people, but I disagree with this, and feel that we must not lose sight of the individual citizen scientist. Even data sharing may not be necessary...there are cases where journals kept by individuals, detailing bird arrival dates in the spring and other phenology events, have provided useful scientific data. Those observations were not reported to a group by that person, but I don't think there's any question that that person was engaged in "citizen science." Benjamin Franklin, Gregor Mendel, and Thomas Jefferson didn't report data in to any central authority, but I'm pretty sure I'd call them citizen scientists. What's the difference between a citizen scientist and an amateur scientist? It would take me some time to think about that, but I believe that there IS a difference. I think one can be both, and I think that a professional/paid scientist (not an "amateur") can ALSO be a citizen scientist. And don't get me started on "citizen" as a reflection of legal citizenship...let's be clear, when we say "citizen" in this context, we mean an inhabitant of a particular area, even if that area is "earth". Citizen science implies an interest and inquisitiveness about your surroundings.

I favor a loose interpretation of the word "citizen" and a strict interpretation of the word "science". And I personally love the term...I don't think there should be an attempt to rename it "community science" or "citizen monitoring" or whatever.

I think there are parallels in our culture between what has happened with music and what has happened with science. Before the days of mass media, music was something that people did with others around them. A few people might eke out a basic living from being a musician, but most people's experience of music was very personal...people played and sang in their own living rooms and porches, within their community. But music now, for many, is a product to be purchased, created to appeal to the lowest common denomitator with cash or credit. People are embarrassed to participate themselves, or feel that they can't spend time on a "hobby" because it doesn't fit in with their "goals". At some point, we let music be taken from us. For many of us, music became something that other people did and that we watched.

Science has become this, too. A "scientist" has become someone with a doctorate degree from an accredited university who's smarter than us and gets paid by corporations or institutions that know what's best for us. But it didn't used to be that way. And whether it's from a need to save a local habitat or from the sheer joy of understanding one more piece of "trivia" about a red-tailed hawk, we need to take science back.

Posted by terrie at June 29, 2007 06:45 AM

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