Citizen Science is hardly a new concept, but during the last decade it has seen a rise in both  academic  and  popular  interest  for  the  topic.  This  trend  is  in  part  driven  by  an  increased  interest  for  open  paradigms,  as  well  as,  Information  Communication  Technology  (ICT)  innovations  such  as  smartphones,  mobile  Internet  and  cloud  computing.  This  has  given  rise to the emergence of a growing and highly diverse crop of new – and often innovative –  initiatives that are being, or could be, labelled as Citizen Science.  Whilst  there  are  often  big  differences  between  projects,  for  instance  when  it  comes  to  power relations – “Who is working for who?” – or the determination of goals and outcomes  – “Who is solving whose problems?” – there is hope that, at the very least, this rediscovery  of  citizen  science  might  lead  to  a  renewed  mutual  interest,  and  perhaps  understanding,  between scientists and the general public. Most citizen science initiatives are set in affluent areas of the world, and by and large they  target an educated, or at least literate, public.  Extreme Citizen Science aspires to extend the  reach and potential of citizen science beyond this restricted context and is defined as: Extreme Citizen Science is a situated, bottom-up practice that takes into account local needs, practices and culture and works with broad networks of people to design and build new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world. In this presentation, we are going to explore the various ExCiteS projects that span from the  Arctic – where we aim to develop tools grounded in the needs of Yupik and Iñupiaq coastal  subsistence hunters who are adapting to the rapidly changing climate – to the Congo basin  rainforest – where we enable marginalised and forest communities to better to share their  vast environmental knowledge more effectively locally and with other regional, national and  global stakeholders. We aim to design, develop, evaluate and deploy a generic platform that enables people with  no or limited literacy – in  the strict and broader  technological sense –  to use smartphones and  tablets  to  collect,  share,  and  analyse  (spatial)  data  along  with  a  methodology  for  introducing,  engaging  and  empowering  marginalised  communities  to  participate  in  and  benefit  from  citizen  science.  The  platform  is  and  will  be  used  in  a  variety  of  concrete projects,  often  related  to  environmental  monitoring.  Ultimately  the  goal  is  to  let  communities build so-called Community Memories: evolving, shared representations of the  state of their environment, their relationship with it, and any threats it faces.

1. Taking Citizen Science to Extremes:
from the Arctic to the Rainforest
Michalis Vitos
PhD Student
ExCiteS Research group
UCL
Emerging ICT for Citizens’ Veillance: Theoretical and Practical Insights
JRC, 21/03/14

2. Audubon: Christmas Bird Count
“Scientific activities in which non-professional
scientists volunteer to participate in data
collection, analysis and dissemination of a
scientific project”
(Cohn 2008; Silvertown 2009).

3. Citizen Science: Volunteered Computing

4. Citizen Science: Volunteered Thinking

5. Citizen Science: Participatory Sensing

6. Levels of Citizen Science
Level 4 ‘Extreme’
•Collaborative Science – problem definition, data collection
and analysis
Level 3 ‘Participatory science’
•Participation in problem definition
and data collection
Level 2 ‘Distributed Intelligence’
•Citizens as basic interpreters
Level 1 ‘Crowdsourcing’
•Citizens as sensors
Haklay (2013)

7. ExCiteS Research Group

8. Our challenge is to provide
communities with tools that
empower them to take
action, and protect their local
environment and way of life.

9. Projects

10. Mapping for Change
• Mapping platform which provides:
– mapping,
– geographical analysis
– and community engagement
services for all types of projects and entities.
• Projects:
– Community Air Quality Mapping
– Community Noise Mapping
Contact: Louise Francis

11. Citizen Science Games for
Biodiversity and Conservation
• In collaboration with ZSL.
• It aims at the design of innovative citizen science
games and methodologies for environmental
monitoring and biodiversity conservation.
Contact: Gianfranco Gliozzo

12. How can ICT assist Arctic hunters
to adapt to climate change?
• Aims to develop a mobile technology for Yupik and
Iñupiaq coastal subsistence hunters who are adapting
to the rapidly changing climate in Arctic Alaska.
• The technology is co-designed with the local people,
reflecting their ways of hunting, learning and knowing.
Contact: Diana Mastracci

13. Community Mapping in the Brazilian Amazon
• Aims to capitalise on the ExCiteS tools and
methodology and apply them in the Brazilian Amazon.
• Answering the question of how digital technology can
help indigenous peoples to communicate their needs
and their perceptions of the environment in order to
improve their livelihoods in the forest.
Contact: Carolina Comandulli

14. Participatory
Monitoring in
the Republic of
the Congo

15. The Problem
• extensive legal and illegal logging by
artisan timber pirates and
industrialised timber companies
• rights of local population are often
overlooked

16. Impact of logging activity on
forest people.
• Direct competition for resources
– eg. Sapelli trees.
• Roads make access easier for
outsiders – commercial hunters
and poachers.

17. Legal context
• FLEGT VPA signed in May 2010.
• Includes socio-economic obligations
for the logging companies:
• respect customs, practices and resources
• have procedures for ongoing dialogue and
compensation/dispute resolution.

18. • In 2013, we collaborated with
Forests Monitor.
• Participatory monitoring for
forest management and measure
social impact of logging.

19. The Challenges
• Illiteracy & education
⁻ Language
⁻ Technology
⁻ Maps
• Lack of network connectivity
• Lack of electricity

20. • Robust Android touch-
screen devices
• Sapelli Data Collector:
– Icon-based
– Hierarchical decision tree
– Easy to adapt in the field
• ExCiteS methodology

21. Sapelli Data Collector

22. Photo and Audio

23. Challenge: device interface

24. Sapelli Launcher
or

25. Component Architecture
Amazon Server
Relay Phone
Dropbox
HTTP

26. Data Transmission via SMS
and/or Wi-Fi/GPRS/3G
• Efficient use of limited space
(1 SMS = 160 7-bit characters = 140 Bytes)
• Chaining of multiple SMS messages (“transmissions”)
• Compression (GZIP, LZMA) & Encryption (AES)
• (Optional) flight-mode cycling to preserve power
• Dropbox upload for media files

27. Hatsuden Nabe

28. Iterative, Participatory Software
Development
Embedded within a wider participatory methodology that
encompasses:
• A detailed process of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC)
• Building Community Protocols for engagement with:
• The project itself
• Other stakeholders in the problems local people have
identified

34. Feeding data back to communities
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35. Conclusion
Opportunities
• The ExCiteS approach worked well within the scope of the project – people
were able to use and contribute to the design of the software, and found
innovative ways to use it to meet their different needs.
Challenges
• However, the extent to which local people could participate in this process was
limited by the goals and structure of the project itself.
• Although the application was easy to use for some, other people required a lot
of training and guidance.

36. Thank you for your attention.
Any questions?
References
Lewis et al. (2007). “Logging in the Congo Basin: What hope for indigenous peoples’ resources and their environments?”.
In: Indigenous Affairs 4/06, pp. 8–15.
Lewis et al. (2012). “Accessible technologies and FPIC: independent monitoring with forest communities in Cameroon”.
In: Biodiversity and culture: exploring community protocols, rights and consent (PLA 65), pp. 151–165.
Vitos, Stevens, Lewis & Haklay (2013). “Making local knowledge matter. Supporting non-literate people to monitor poaching in Congo”.
In: 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (ACM DEV 2013; Jan. 11-12, 2013, Bangalore, India).
Stevens, Vitos, Lewis & Haklay (2013). “Participatory monitoring of poaching in the Congo basin”.
In: 21st GIS Research UK conference (GISRUK 2013, April 2-5, 2013, Liverpool, UK).
Email: Michalis.Vitos.11@ucl.ac.uk
Website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites
Blog: http://uclexcites.wordpress.com