H2020 WeObserve Project - First Annual Plenary Meeting & Forums for Communities of Practice

The IIASA led, H2020 funded WeObserve project will hold its first annual plenary meeting on 26 Nov 2018, bringing together the consortium partners to review the first year of activities since the project's launch last December, and forge plans for 2019. This meeting will take place in Venice, Italy, ahead of the 2nd International COWM Conference (COWM2018), which will also host the forums of the four WeObserve Communities of Practice (CoPs).

During COWM2018, WeObserve will launch its fourth and last CoP on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Citizen Observatories. As with the currently running CoPs, CoP-SDGs will be a vehicle for sharing and consolidating knowledge and best practices on key topics related to Citizen Observatories (COs). In addition to the CoP-SDGs launch, the currently running CoPs will hold their second face to face forums at COWM2018.

Are you already involved in citizen science and citizen observatory initiatives or working groups? Are you keen to exchange experiences with like-minded citizen science enthusiasts? Then consider participating in a CoP that represents your area of expertise. Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to engage with a wide range of stakeholders in the field of citizen science and COs!

The first three CoPs were launched earlier this year on 6 Jun during the Citizen Science Workshop Day at the 2nd International ECSA Conference. Below is a description of each CoP thematic area:

• CoP1 Co-creating citizen observatories and engaging citizens – addressing incentives and barriers for participation, engagement strategies and citizen-science ethics (led by IHE Delft)
• CoP2 Impact and value of citizen observatories for governance – defining socio-economic and environmental impacts of community-based environmental monitoring for public authorities and decision makers including risk evaluation (led by IHE Delft)
• CoP3 Interoperability and standards for citizen observatories – adopting the interoperability experiment format to test and improve implementation of vocabularies for describing projects and data, data quality, data sharing curation and preservation of citizen-science data, and addressing privacy and authentication licensing for CO sustainability (led by CREAF).
• CoP4 UN Sustainable Development Goals and citizen observatories - identifying the potential and challenges of using data acquired through citizen science in the successful implementation of the SDGs (led by IIASA).

The CoPs aim to strengthen the knowledge base about COs, and move citizen science into the mainstream of environmental management and decision making. As such, a wide range of stakeholders is invited to take part, including public authorities (local, regional, national, EU), civil society organizations, research and academia, citizens and citizen science working groups.

CoP activities include thematic knowledge co-creation, generating new solutions or agreeing on how to use existing ones, and knowledge sharing activities (meetings, events, conferences).

Not yet convinced to join a CoP? Consider the following opportunities and benefits of participation:

• Sharing ideas, knowledge or experiences and work with others (networking)
• Leveraging ideas or knowledge
• Working towards concrete solutions in citizen science and optimise relevant resources
• Testing and implementing services in a collaborative environment
• Helping to broaden your own and your organisation’s knowledge and horizons (capacity development)
• Linking up with relevant initiatives at a global, national, regional or local level

Each of the four CoPs receive support and tools for managing its activities (online and F2F) and undertaking dissemination and outreach activities. The CoPs will exist as long as they continue to provide value to their members, with WeObserve support to draw on for the project duration. Please read our Terms of Reference for more details.

Last edited: 19 November 2018