European project · Citizen science infrastructure
RIECS-Concept
Towards a pan-European research infrastructure for excellent citizen science
About the project
The project tackles current problems such as fragmentation, interoperability and efficiency, and lays the foundations for the world’s first comprehensive design for citizen science.
RIECS-Concept is a Horizon Europe project carried out by a consortium of 13 partners from 8 countries. It is led by Fundación Ibercivis and, in Spain, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) also takes part.
RIECS-Concept designs the European research infrastructure for citizen science, drawing on both the resources contributed by citizens (such as mobile phones and computers) and existing scientific resources (citizen science platforms, data collections, other research infrastructures and so on). This infrastructure will provide cross-cutting services to the research community.
RIECS-Concept will produce two key results that will form the basis of a bid for the ESFRI 2030 call:
To achieve this, the project will research and work with all kinds of communities worldwide to gather needs, co-design solutions and refine the proposed solutions across a range of topics and scientific fields.
Project objectives
The RIECS-Concept project has three main objectives:
The role of Ibercivis
Ibercivis reports to the funding authority and leads the administrative, financial and technical management. It also oversees the technological aspects, ensuring the design, integration and operation of the future citizen science infrastructure.
Our activities
- Ibercivis reports to the funding authority and leads the administrative, financial and technical management. It also oversees the technological aspects, ensuring the design, integration and operation of the future citizen science infrastructure.
- Ibercivis leads the preliminary design of the catalogue of services, resources and features.
- It carries out the technical feasibility and integration study, which results in a report on technical viability and scientific excellence. This report sets out an overall conceptual design that brings together technological and scientific dimensions, proposing cross-cutting architectural solutions tailored to each end user.
- In parallel, Ibercivis works to align RIECS data and metadata with the European framework and helps define the framework for sustainability, collaboration and policy support.
- Ibercivis also plays an active role in stakeholder engagement, setting up a key participation model for co-creating the roadmap during the design phase, and so promoting co-design and open governance.
- Among its other key responsibilities, Ibercivis leads the drafting of the project management handbook, the ethics management plan, the data management plan, the quality and risk contingency plan, and the progress reports. It also coordinates ethical, legal, intellectual property and data management throughout the project, and helps set up, coordinate and manage the External Advisory Board.
Gallery
Project details
Type of project
European
Duration
2025 – 2027
Funding
Horizon Europe, call HORIZON-INFRA-2024-DEV-01-01 (grant agreement no. 101188210)
Area
Citizen science infrastructure
