[:en]Due to the boom of practices we are currently facing, there is a need of having a clear picture of the situation in Europe. Addressing this, the Ibercivis Foundation is creating the Observatory of Citizen Science in Spain, co-funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology FECYT. It aims to monitor the rapid growth of such initiatives, to catalogue them and to analyze different impacts. The basic idea is to know who does what. One of the challenges is to define what is and what is not citizen science. By inviting actors to put themselves on the map, an interesting debate will emerge through the deliberate expansion of the concept.
During a first analysis, Ibercivis has collected already almost 90 practices including participatory projects, research groups, and also institutions who collaborate, finance or disseminate citizen science. An estimation of 200 cases in Spain will be cataloged by the end of 2016. In addition to this repository, the Observatory seeks to understand how citizen science is changing the relationship between science and society. Therefore, a set of tools, such as metrics, will be identified and used. Among others, techniques from both humanities and social networks analysis will be used.
This observatory will be accessible on the website www.ciencia-ciudadana.es to be launched in early April 2016. At this moment, this URL leads to the basic questionnaire used for the first initial analysis.
Contact person: Fermín Serrano fermin@bifi.es www.ibercivis.es[:]