Saturday, April 18, 2015

Social Media Supports #CitizenScience

The citizen science community is adeptly leveraging social media to increase communication and collaboration within the network.

Each month, the community holds a Twitter conversation with the hashtag #CitSciChat to share exciting news and upcoming events. The discussions feature a moderator, panelists from citizen science organizations, and anyone who wants to join the conversation.

Groups who might never have collaborated without the ease and low cost of social media can support one another's pursuits, share successful strategies, and discuss the state of #CitizenScience from their diverse organizational perspectives and broad geographic distribution.



Additionally, the March #CitSciChat moderator, Caren Cooper, archived the conversation on Storify. All questions and answers were collected in one location, and in chronological order. Participants can easily refer back to information provided by peer projects and organizations. 

Public and nonprofit organizations that depend on citizen science data can also send the link to their networks and followers. The Monarch Joint Venture (a public-private partnership) featured the #CitSciChat in their April 2015 newsletter, which they then shared with their Facebook and Twitter followers.



Citizen science projects are grateful for the reach provided by social media platforms. Most #CitSci projects require temporally and spatially dispersed data, and social media has drastically increased the ability to reach out to new audiences across continents and the entire globe. Project groups view social media as an invaluable resource for finding and communicating with project volunteers.


Likewise, policymakers and managers also benefit from a growing and increasingly cohesive citizen science network. Data generated by citizen scientists can influence important conservation and other policy decisions, so more data can lead to more accurate predictions and more informed decisions.



The low-cost collaborative power provided by social media platforms will continue to be indispensable for citizen science projects, other nonprofit ventures, and the public agencies who fund them and rely on their data.


1 comment:

  1. All questions and answers were collected in one location, and in chronological order. Participants can easily refer back to information provided by peer projects and organizations.
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