10.04.2025RIECS-Concept – Harnessing the full potential of Citizen Science in Europe

As of January 2025, Citizen Science Zurich is part of RIECS-Concept, a 3-years EU project supported by Horizon Infrastructures 2024. Together with eleven partners we will conceptualize a European Research Infrastructure that will effectively serve Citizen Science practitioners and enable the establishment of active science-policy-society partnerships.

Author: Rosy Mondardini

The ambitious goal of RIECS-Concept is to conceptualize a European Research Infrastructure for Excellence in Citizen Science (RIECS) that will leverage citizens' resources – such as mobile phones, desktop computers - and existing scientific resources – such as Citizen Science platforms, data collections platforms, existing Research Infrastructures - to provide transversal services to the whole research community. The project will deliver both a conceptual design, including a feasibility study and a five-year implementation plan. To this end, it will explore technical, operational, societal, and environmental challenges associated with the establishment of the new infrastructure.

Harnessing the full potential of Citizen Science is not an easy task and it requires changing mindsets and developing new tools. Governments should enable science-policy-society knowledge hubs, networks, and solution-focused laboratories equipped to receive, store, analyse, refine and further share data coming for Citizen Science activities. Such data will have to be shared with experts and non-experts alike, to ensure enhanced public policy support and to achieve a broader impact on complex societal challenges.

The guiding principle of the project is co-creation, emphasising the importance for the twelve partners in the consortium of collective design and planning. RIECS-Concept will actively involve future users throughout the conceptualisation process, including a wide range of existing Citizen Science networks, citizens and communities, research networks from diverse scientific domains, and policy making organizations at all levels. Establishing stakeholders’ engagement from the conceptualization phase of RIECS is essential to ensuring transparency, inclusivity, and societal uptake of the new RI. At the same time, it will enhance the long-term use, trustworthiness, and diversity of the results.

The implementation of such as open and participatory approach to governance implies the identification and constant engagement of key stakeholders, an effort that will continue along the whole duration of the project. Partners will mobilize their institutional and social networks in science, technology, policy, and society. They will harvest the collective know-how of scientists, citizens, Citizen Science initiative managers, technology providers, education centres, and decision makers. To this end, the consortium will provide multiple opportunities for collaboration, stimulating critical dialogues and trying to integrate all needs and perspectives.

The main tasks of Citizen Science Zurich (CSZ) within the project are related to stakeholder engagement activities, with the specific responsibility of finding out and integrating the requirements for the infrastructure coming from international organizations and global policy making institutions. We will collaborate with representatives of such groups to ensure RIECS-Concept’s compatibility with existing global standards for data and knowledge - especially in the field of sustainability. The rationale behind this specific engagement is the ambition of RIECS to make Citizen Science projects an official and standard source of data for the assessment and monitoring of global sustainability efforts, starting from the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We are well placed to lead this activity, building on the experience gained with years of engagement in initiatives relating Citizen Science to the SDGs (e.g. EU CROWD4SDG project, the SDG Olympiad, multiple international working groups). Moreover, we will be able to leverage the unique platform provided by the Swiss Hub of the Citizen Science Global Partnership (CSGP) a network-of-networks that brings together regional and national Citizen Science Associations, networks, and practitioners to promote and advance Citizen Science for a sustainable world. CSZ jointly run the partnership’s Swiss Hub with UNIGE and provides strategic communications support to the secretariat.

The Swiss Hub is established at the SDG Solution Space, an innovation space located at the heart of Geneva international quarter, providing privileged access to the city’s more than 500 international and non-governmental Organizations. A key role of CSZ in RIECS is to leverage CSGP’s network and the strategic location of its Swiss Hub to engage with global governance bodies and promote evidence-based methodologies for measuring progress towards local and global sustainability targets.

The world will be able to address the many challenges it faces, present and future, only with an approach to scientific knowledge production rooted deeply in society, and with active engagement of citizens in the society-science-policy nexus. The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) recommends the use of participatory methods – such as Citizen Science – to bring science and citizens closer together. The EU seeks to harness the collective knowledge of its citizens by embracing open innovation practices, and many EU policies (e.g. the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles and the European strategy for data) support this momentum.

RIECS will enable Citizen Science to be at the very core of the policies-society relationship, acknowledging that society is not just a recipient of - but effectively an active partner for - science. We are proud and eager to play a key role in this effort.