VIII International Symposium on Marine Sciences, 6-8 July 2022, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, España
To date, despite the global acceptance of the need for effective citizen engagement as one of the most important steps for the success of citizen science programs, there is a lack of a common theoretical framework for recruitment and most projects rely on intuition or trial and error to develop their engagement strategies. Effective citizen science engagement needs theoretical models of participation and the concurrent action of different actors to implement the model. Besides, citizen observatories are evolving towards infrastructures with technical but also social components to ensure long-term engagement. We have developed and tested an engagement model for citizen science projects using a novel approach that combines different strategies and theoretical models that have been proven efficient in other disciplines such as human behaviour change and persuasion. Our model is based on four pillars that are interconnected and feed each other: theoretical engagement frameworks for behavioural change (Khan et al, Fogg B., Eyal, Yardley et al, Crall et al); social design for citizen observatories (Yamakami); strategies for maintaining volunteer motivation (Ryan and Deci, Stukas et al); and strategies to increment the ability of volunteers (Cigliano et al). The proposed model integrates all the actors of the Quintuple Helix framework of Innovation (Salmon et al, Carayannis et al): the academic community (that provides the data curation and a technological support though a citizen observatory), an enabling community formed by the government and the industry (that facilitate access to a local community and provide field support to overcome participatory barriers), the citizens providing the data, and the natural and social environment. Specifically, we have implemented and tested this model and we provide a case study of a marine citizen science project that monitors urban beaches since 2018: UrbamarBIO. Furthermore, together with the proposed model, we provide specific tools that will help managers to design tailored strategies to overcome the specific engagement challenges of their citizen science project
The research described in this paper was funded by the European Commission via the Cos4Cloud project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 863463. ICM-CSIC authors acknowledge the institutional support of the “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excel-lence” accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)