Two days, six sessions with short presentations, nine working groups, ten workshops, thirty posters, and much more – the annual conference “Forum Citizen Science” in the beginning of May 2021 in a nutshell. For the first time, the conference was held digitally and – this might be seen as an advantage of digital events – more than 250 interested participants from the German speaking citizen science community gathered online. The conference motto was “trust, impact, change: Citizen Science as driving force/power of transformation?” and it was also the focus of the expert panel on the second day, showing that there is still a huge potential for citizen science yet to be explored – such as aspects like diversity, impact assurance or evaluation of projects. The experts also agreed that we are on the right track to foster the exchange between science and society via citizen science. All in all, the discussed topics and formats during the conference were manifold and covered presentations of citizen science projects in social and natural sciences as well as interactive workshops and discussions – e.g. about the question “What is Citizen Science?” using the characteristics of the ECSA vignettes (Hakley et al. 2020) .
The CS Track project team was happy to present a poster to the interested audience during the poster session on May 6. After a short introduction of our European research project we explained different methods and project activities we used and realized so far, such as the setup of the project database with over 12.000 international projects, the international survey with over 1.000 citizen scientists, or the publication of the first articles of the new e-magazine. We were happy to see that attendees showed a high level of interest in our project, especially in the methods we applied and the findings we gained so fare.
Wissenschaft im Dialog, one of the consortium partners, was organizing the conference together with the Natural History Museum Berlin and the Technical University Berlin. Since 2014, Wissenschaft im Dialog and the Natural History Museum are running the national plattform for Citizen Science “Bürger schaffen Wissen” in Germany.
More information about the conference (in German):
