The WeObserve practice communities met in Barcelona to transform citizen observatories

CREAF, part of the consortium of the project, was the organizer of the event, which took place between November 25 and 27 at the Casa Convalescència in Barcelona, ​​to deepen the challenges is facing the citizen science.

Last November, the fourth face-to-face forum of the four practice communities (CoPs) of the WeObserve 2020 European project took place in Barcelona. WeObserve was born to improve the coordination of the different citizen observatories in the face of the growing tendency of citizen science, and to transform these citizen observatories in a valuable component to manage the various environmental challenges we face.

The conference began with a talk by Diana Escobar on the role and actions of the Barcelona Office of Citizen Science, and Alex Richter-Boix on the strategies followed to increase and engage citizen participation in the Mosquito Alert project. Then the members of the Interoperability CoP, coordinated by Joan Masó of CREAF, met to discuss vocabularies to describe citizen science, while the Impact CoP, coordinated by Uta Wehner of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, worked on the development of a template to describe the impact stories of citizen observatories.

On the second day, the CoP of Engagement and the CoP of Sustainable Development Goals met to work on a template of co-design practices and how to maintain the participation and engagement of citizens in citizen science projects. The teams spent the day discussing upcoming efforts of research and prepare documents. The Interoperability CoP worked on the analysis of the SensorThings API standard, an open and unified framework of the Open Geospatial Consortium to connect devices and data through the web. On the last day, Jaume Piera, a researcher at ICM-CSIC and CREAF, presented the COS4Cloud project, related to the interoperability of citizen science projects.

The WeObserve consortium consists of the current citizen observatories H2020: Ground Truth 2.0, GROW, LandSense, and Scent. WeObserve is a project of the Coordination and Support Actions 2020 with seven European institutions forming part of its consortium. 19 members of the different CoPs and 4 participants online participated in the fourth forum in Barcelona.

Autor: Àlex Richter-Boix