Emerging forms of empowered participatory governance have generated considerable scholarly excitement, but critics continue to ask if such initiatives are “for real”: Are participatory governance processes sufficiently independent? Do citizen participants make good policy choices? An in-depth look at the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform suggests that real citi...

Introduction This workshop discusses three distinct but related topics. The first topic is citizen science which involves volunteers all around the world generating data to address scientific problems and recently led to breakthroughs in the natural sciences. Citizen science typically involves volunteers playing online games while unknowingly solving real scientific problems. This approach can ...

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for research on citizen science, a form of collaboration involving scientists and volunteers in scientific research. Designing CSCW systems to support this type of scientific collaboration requires understanding the effects of organizational and work design on the scientific outcomes of citizen science projects. Initial directions for future research...

The Medical Information System (MedISys) is a fully automatic 24/7 public health surveillance system monitoring human and animal infectious diseases and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats in open-source media. In this article, we explain the technology behind MedISys, deJens P. Linge Joint Research Centre of the European Commission Institute for the Protection and Sec...

Citizen science changes the way scientific research is pursued. It opens up data collection and analysis to the general public, to the wisdom of crowds. In this emerging area, there is much research to be done to better understand how we can develop citizen science infrastructure and continue the democratization of science. In creating such systems, there is much we can learn from principles th...

Currently, most citizen science projects that adopt a crowdsourcing model focus primarily on collecting and analyzing data. As yet, few of them leverage community interactions for effective data validation yet, which would have significant impact on improving the quality of the increasing volume of citizen science data. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory pilot study focused on understan...

BACKGROUND Physical inactivity across the lifespan remains a public health issue for many developed countries. Inactivity has contributed considerably to the pervasiveness of lifestyle diseases. Government, national and local agencies and organizations have been unable to systematically, and in a coordinated way, translate behavioral research into practice that makes a difference at a populatio...

Citizen science-the involvement of volunteers in data collection, analysis and interpretation-simultaneously supports research and public engagement with science, and its profile is rapidly rising. Citizen science represents a diverse range of approaches, but until now this diversity has not been quantitatively explored. We conducted a systematic internet search and discovered 509 environmental...