'Extreme' Citizen Science - ExCiteS

公民科学--业余爱好者、志愿者和爱好者参与科学项目--并不是什么新鲜事，因为有一些活动，如圣诞节鸟类观察或英国鸟类学调查信托基金，志愿者观察鸟类并向国家知识库报告。这些项目可以追溯到世纪早期，今天用于气候建模的许多温度记录都是由业余爱好者自己操作气象站收集的。在过去的十年里，Web 2.0技术导致了公民科学活动的激增，从SETI@Home，人们自愿使用他们未使用的计算机处理能力，到Galaxy Zoo，业余天文学家建议解释哈勃望远镜的图像，到伦敦德特福德的佩皮斯庄园，在那里，居民进行了为期六周的社区噪音监测，以挑战当地废料场经营者的活动。然而，目前公民科学项目的范围在几个方面受到限制。首先，在大多数情况下，参与者仅被信任为被动参与者（通过捐赠CPU周期）或主动参与者，但仅限于基本观察和数据收集。他们不参与问题定义或科学分析本身。其次，有一个隐含的假设，即参与者将具有相对较高的教育水平。第三，很大程度上是因为教育要求，公民科学大多发生在富裕的地方，因此大多数对鼓励生物多样性保护至关重要的地方，以及人口增长最快的地方，实际上被排除在外。这一提议通过建议建立一个跨学科的研究小组来挑战目前的公民科学模式，该研究小组将专注于“极端”公民科学（ExCiteS）。ExciteS在三个方面是极端的：第一，它旨在发展理论和方法，使任何社区都能启动一个公民科学项目，处理从生物多样性到粮食生产等与他们有关的问题;第二，它将提供一套工具，任何用户，无论其文化水平如何，都可以使用这些工具，通过使用既定的科学方法收集、分析信息并采取行动;最后，它的目标是在全球地球仪使用公民科学的方法，通过合作活动开发一种技术，使从伦敦的住宅区到刚果盆地的狩猎采集者和森林村民的社区参与进来。基础技术的目标是普及，并为许多其他项目和活动提供基础。将要开发的技术将依赖于信息的空间和地理表示。关注这种表示模式的原因是，作为人类交流的一种形式，地理表示早于文本，并且可能被许多阅读和技术素养有限的人所理解。ExciteS具有变革潜力，可以应对在热门领域使用科学和信息与通信技术所涉及的一些重大可持续性挑战。（由于气候变化）、平坦（由于全球化）和拥挤（由于人口增长）的世界，通过创造工具帮助社区了解其环境的变化，并通过使用科学建模和管理方法来管理环境。该提案不仅侧重于将ExciteS发展为一种实践，而且重要的是，通过研究参与者的动机及其激励措施，确定数据收集模式，并处理以这种方式收集的数据的不确定性和有效性，来发展对公民科学的基本理解。

Citizen Science - the participation of amateurs, volunteers and enthusiasts in scientific projects - is not new, given activities such as the Christmas Bird Watch or the British Trust for Ornithology Survey, in which volunteers observe birds and report to a national repository. Such projects date back to the early 20th century, and many of the temperature records used in climate modelling today have been collected by amateur enthusiasts operating their own weather stations. Over the past decade, Web 2.0 technologies have led to the proliferation of Citizen Science activities, from SETI@Home, where people volunteer their unused computer processing power, to Galaxy Zoo, where amateur astronomers suggest interpretations of images from the Hubble telescope, to the Pepys Estate in Deptford, London, where residents carried out community noise monitoring for six weeks to challenge the activities of a local scrapyard operator. However, the current range of Citizen Science projects is limited in several respects. First, in most instances the participants are trusted only as passive participants (by donating CPU cycles), or as active participants, but limited to basic observation and data collection. They do not participate in problem definition or in the scientific analysis itself. Second, there is an implicit assumption that participants will have a relatively advanced level of education. Third, and largely because of the educational requirements, Citizen Science occurs mostly in affluent places, and therefore most of the places that are critical for encouraging biodiversity conservation, and where population growth is most rapid, are effectively excluded. This proposal challenges this current mode of Citizen Science by suggesting the establishment of an interdisciplinary research group that will focus on 'Extreme' Citizen Science (ExCiteS). ExCiteS is extreme in three ways: first, it aims to develop the theories and methodologies to allow any community to start a Citizen Science project that will deal with the issues that concern them - from biodiversity to food production; second, it will provide a set of tools that can be used by any user, regardless of their level of literacy, to collect, analyse and act on information by using established scientific methods; finally, it aims to use the methodologies of Citizen Science around the globe, by developing a technology, through collaborative activities, that can involve communities from housing estates in London to hunter-gatherers and forest villagers in the Congo Basin. The underlying technology is aimed to be universal and to provide the foundations for many other projects and activities. The technology that will be developed will rely on spatial and geographical representations of information. The reason for focusing on this mode of representation is that, as a form of human communication, geographical representations predate text, and are likely to be accessible by many people with limited reading and technology literacy.ExCiteS has the transformative potential to deal with some of the major sustainability challenges involved in using science and Information and Communication Technologies in a hot (due to climate change), flat (due to globalisation) and crowded (due to population increase) world, by creating tools that will help communities understand their environment as it changes, and manage it by using scientific modelling and management methods. The proposal focuses not only on the development of ExCiteS as a practice, but, significantly, on developing a fundamental understanding of Citizen Science by studying the motivation of participants and their incentives, identifying patterns of data collection, and dealing with the uncertainty and validity of data collected in this way.