First Citizen Science Workshop

Welcome

On behalf of the Science Organising Committee I would like to invite you to the first ASTERICS Citizen Science Workshop on 25-27 July 2016 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University.

The objective of this workshop is to design and prototype mass participation experiments linked to some or all of the astronomy ESFRI facilities and their precursors / pathfinders, namely

• the Square Kilometre Array
• the European Extremely Large Telescope
• KM3NeT, the cubic km neutrino observatory
• the Cherenkov Telescope Array.

This will be a “working” workshop where we will take ideas for citizen science experiments, discuss their potential, and prototype the best ideas using the Zooniverse Panoptes platform (for which we will have experts on hand).

We will also write the workshop up in a special issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (which has published several SKA precursor papers), presenting the science goals and project design of the resulting citizen science experiments.

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please contact the chair of the organising committee. If you have a specific suggestion for someone who would have the right skills and interests to contribute to this workshop, then please bring this website to their attention.

Best wishes, Johanna Jarvis (chair) on behalf of the SOC

Workshop Preparation

Before coming to the workshop, we would like you to come up with some ideas for citizen science experiments, and be prepared to make a 5 minute (or less) presentation of each idea. The following guidance may be helpful.

• We are particularly keen on mass participation experiments that are well-aligned with the highest priority science goals of the facilities, and that can be prototyped on pathfinder / precursor facilities.

• Citizen science is NOT OUTREACH: it is a research tool, like a spectrometer, but deploying hundreds of thousands of volunteers on a problem. Typically, these problems are difficult to characterise computationally but easy for human pattern recognition, such as spotting penguins, classifying galaxies, or reading archaic handwriting.

• What makes a successful citizen science project? Zooniverse experience suggests that participants ask themselves the following:
  • How easy is it?
  • How beautiful is it?
  • How important is it?
  • How famous could I get if I find something?
  • How much am I learning?
  • Are the scientists / science teams directly involved?

Science Organising Committee

• Johanna Jarvis (chair) - j [dot] f [dot] jarvisopen [dot] ac [dot] uk
• Stephen Serjeant
• Chris Lintott
• Lucy Fortson
• Rob van der Meer
• Giuseppe Cimo

Provisional Timetable

Workshop Registration

To register your interest in attending the ASTERICS Citizen Science Workshop please complete this survey. Details of payment methods will then arrive by e-mail.