Citizen Science Hack Day at Medialab-Prado, Madrid
Come and join other citizen scientists, humanities folks, technologists, designers, students, scientists, and all who are curious for a two days of Crowdcrafting Citizen Science at Medialab-Prado, Madrid, Spain. We’ll be hacking together apps and projects with various open tools such as Epicollect, PyBossa and/or BOINC.
The goal of the hackfest is to show the benefits that Citizen Science gives to citizens as well as professional scientists thanks to the new technologies. At the hackfest you will be able to learn about the tools used in volunteer sensing: data acquisition thanks to smartphones and gadgets for scientific projects, volunteer thinking: problem solving thanks to volunteers that collaborate in scientific projects using the web browser, and volunteer computing: where the volunteer donates his/her computer resources, (CPU idle cycles) to different projects.
Image by Daniel Lombraña (CC BY-SA 2.0)
How it works?
- The first day, Friday 17, we will start with some short talks (around 10 minutes each) about different Citizen Science Projects and/or the technologies used in these projects.
- The second day, Saturday 18, you will be the main protagonists: the participants. In this second day we would like that you propose new projects or ideas around citizen science project that could be developed along the day (basically a prototype). You will have 5 minutes to engage the rest of the participants!
- We’ll invite you to ‘team-up’ around the ideas you’d like to help make happen, but feel free to ‘vote with your feet’ and join other teams at any stage of the day.
- At the end we’ll do a show and tell to see what folks came up with.
We will provide support for any teams who’d like to continue working on their projects or apps beyond the event!
What do I need to participate?
In principle you will only need a laptop, but feel free to bring any hardware, gadget, device that you think it is relevant for the hackfest and that could help in a citizen science project. For example, bring your own mobile phone (we will try EpiCollect in Android) as we will show how you can help in the acquisition of data, or an Arduino device that you have created, etc. In other words: bring any device that you think it will be useful for a citizen science project.
But if I’m not a scientist or a developer, how can I help?
You are more than welcome! Actually your participation is really important. Why? Because this workshop is about Citizen Science, so we want your participation in the event and the projects. How? Well, it is easy, giving us feedback, ideas, suggestions about the projects and tools that we are presenting. Maybe you know different languages, so you can help translating a project, or maybe you are a designer so you could work with the scientists creating a really nice logo for the project. As you can see, you can help a lot!
What is Citizen Science
Citizen Science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists, often by crowdsourcing data collection, problem solving & thinking. Formally, citizen science has been defined as “the systematic collection and analysis of data; development of technology; testing of natural phenomena; and the dissemination of these activities by researchers on a primarily avocational basis”. Citizen science is sometimes called “public participation in scientific research.”
Citizen Cyberscience leverages digital tools, mobile technologies and the web to involve citizen around the globe in the ‘formulating’ and ‘doing’ of Science.
Crowdcrafting tools provide online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more.
Open Science means many things, but primarily scientific knowledge that people are free to use, re-use and distribute without legal, technological or social restrictions.
Organizers
The Citizen Cyberscience Centre
Socientize
Sponsors
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