Combining citizen science and public engagement: the Open AirLaboratories Programme

Citizen Science (or "Public Participation in Scientific Research"), has attracted attention as a new way of engaging the public with science through recruiting them to participate in scientific research. It is often seen as a win-win solution to promoting public engagement to scientists as well as empowering the public and in the process enhancing science literacy. This paper presents a qualitative study of interviews with scientists and communicators who participated in the "OPAL" project, identifying three potential flashpoints where conflicts can (though not necessarily do) arise for those working on citizen science professionally. We find that although participation in the CS project was generally valued, it does not seem to overcome continuing (and widely reported) concerns about public engagement. We suggest that enthusiasm for win-win situations should be replaced with more realistic expectations about what scientists can expect to get out of CS-style public engagement. 1. Background and introduction The concept of promoting public engagement in science through involving members of the public in scientific research — often labeled "Citizen Science" (CS hereafter; the term was coined independently in the mid 1990s by Rick Bonney in the US and Alan Irwin in the UK 1 ) or "Public Participation in Scientific Research" (PPSR) — has received enthusiastic support over recent years. 2,3,4 This enthusiasm derives from several sources, reflecting different aims and aspirations often associated with CS. First, it can be seen as a win-win situation where a project simultaneously delivers public engagement (PE hereafter) as well as scientific research, solving some of the problems often identified with getting more scientists into communicating science by making it worth their while scientifically. 5 CS can also help monitoring the local environment where otherwise resources are scarce, 6 again coupled with a PE aspect of empowering people to take ownership of their local environment. Second, CS, by involving the public directly in the production of scientific research, can help in teaching not only in terms of generating evidence but also in demonstrating how science is done, thereby enhancing public understanding of the processes of science, its inherent uncertainties, the methods it uses to arrive at conclusions and the practical skills scientists need to acquire in order to reach their conclusions.