I-CHANGE will empower citizens through knowledge acquired through hands-on participation in the monitoring and assessment. Engaging citizens in environmental monitoring and data gathering is not an easy task but support can come from previous projects. This is the case of the ACTION project, which supported 16 citizen science projects in the field of pollution and developed the ACTION toolkit for participatory science.
The ACTION toolkit considers all the phases of a typical research process, but put citizen participation at the center of it. It provides a selection of practical instruments and learning outcomes that can support citizen science teams in all these phases of their citizen science project and addresses the practical problems that projects face throughout their lifecycle:
The toolkit is useful to everyone who wishes to apply citizen science methods. It can be used by citizen volunteers, local communities interested in starting a citizen science project, researchers wishing to engage with citizens in their work, or public authorities interacting with citizens or working on policies where citizen science insights are relevant.
It draws on the expertise in pollution, citizen science, participatory design, social innovation, socio-economic studies, open science, social computing, open data and software development from the Horizon 2020 ACTION project, to ensure it suits the requirements of citizen science projects, addressing the practical problems that they face throughout the different stages of each project.
Enjoy exploring and applying!