Citizen science has already proved its usefulness in tackling environmental challenges bCitizen science is increasingly playing a prominent role in tackling a wide range of environmental challenges by collecting relevant data, taking part in established scientific processes or raising awareness. So far, the vast majority of these projects have focused on the organisational and community aspects of citizen science, on the financing of specific citizen science campaigns or the development of sensors for the collection of specific data. As a result, the technological support for citizen scientists to implement their campaigns has thus far mostly happened in an ad-hoc fashion tailor-made for each specific campaign or type of data to be collected.
This proposal builds on a previous citizen science project funded by the Flemish research funding agency VLAIO (Belgium). This project resulted in the weave.ly prototype platform, a no-code development tool specifically targeting citizen scientists as a backbone of a citizen observatory. The platform has been demonstrated in several domains (e.g. mobility, air quality measurements, etc.).
In this project we will develop a European Citizen Observatory Platform that will provide an open online platform to develop citizen science and citizen sensing campaigns in multiple domains that are relevant for climate change and environmental issues and can act as the de-facto technological standard for European citizen scientists. We will also demonstrate the ability of this platform to design and implement citizen science campaigns relevant to climate change and demonstrate the platform's ability to support behavioural change based on campaign output. Key elements of the platform will be designed through a co-creation process with communities of citizen scientists, researchers, businesses and civil society organisations. Finally, we will ensure the platform's viability beyond the scope of our action through a sustainable business model.