H2020 citizen science discussion

Research Network Horizon
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The deliverable is an excuse. But a good one, one that would hold water in a proposal. What you want is the activity: get some people’s time covered to accelerate this sort of work. Pick any activity, and then throw some time at it so that (a) any tacit knowledge lying around is harvested and documented and (b) have more knowledge generated, simply by having people do the same thing again and again, and documenting hacks that work (“empty jam jars and cook them in your pressure cooker on the stove”) and hacks that do not work so well.

Yes. Which does not mean we are closed to anyone else participating in that.

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Some more thoughts…

I notice Edgeryders is taking on some of the offline work in WP1 as well. I had first envisioned that ER would be doing mostly online community & facilitation, and RG the offline wet lab work.

But now thinking about it, it makes more sense to divide the work differently: ER taking the lead on community infrastructure (offline & online) and RG taking the lead on scientific knowledge and infrastructure (offline & online). Of course there will be overlap. This way it’s more mixing of expertise and especially dividing the problem into more manageable subparts for our approach. There’s no constant “handing off” of certain activities or people from the online to the offline.

Also, I’m thinking that by defining an “online” part and an “offline” part, the offline/online interface becomes kind of self-fulfilling, no? But if you have a community part that flows from offline to online, tackled by the same team, the transition could go more smoothly.

Also from experience it’s sometimes surprising what has the biggest impact. Coming back to the discussion in this thread: constantly stewarding information is quite fundamental, both offline and online. We have now 8 design students running around in our lab working on 2 questions:
“How do we reduce the amount of knowledge lost in the community eg. from people not documenting what they do”
“How do we increase the amount of knowledge that newcomers have access to, eg. by making it apparent what they can do in the lab when they walk in?”
That would be way more effective if done by one team over both the offline and online.

So my hunch is that “community” and “wet lab work” done by different partners will integrate with each other more easily than “offline” with “online”. Maybe that’s how you already thought it up, so in that case I got it just now :wink:

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Yes, this is how I think of it. EDGE is, specifically, running the conversation part; we want a conversation about citizen science, for the community to reflect on what it’s doing. It doubles up as the primary dataset for an ethnography of citizen science. This ethnography is itself done as citizen science, involving citizen ethnographers – and they, in turn, participate to the conversation about citizen science and citizen ethnography.

At the same time, wetware hackers will maintain their own wikis and, possibly, more technical channels (even though it would be great if they were on the biofab forum, because this means those could become ethno data too). Similarly, citizen ethnographers will have their own wiki with the evolving ontology (in fact, we are making it a deliverable), and again we will create on edgeryders.eu a “citizen ethnographers” category. This recursion is what makes CCCP so elegant. The main difference is that EDGE will work more closely with TANT Lab on the ethnography than with Reagent on the wet lab work.

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Our current Hackuarium mycelium experiments are certainly going to benefit from the manual you have made already! It is also driving a new biohacking project in the lab - a mushroom picking device… However, for a citizen science project that could pull in many players and provide both workshop opportunities and potential deliverables, we had some thoughts more along the lines of an ‘urban gardens boosted by rhizobial bacteria’ project. I think I mentioned this before, and again I am not the expert (should our expert join this forum, I think I asked also already), but the idea is that you soak seeds in solutions with the beneficial bacteria that fix nitrogen, in a sense making fertiliser ‘in situ’ … Should I send some more complete text about this idea? In its current form, it could both provide new knowledge and get more passionate people involved. (sorry again I am late joining this thread…) It’s awesome that you are going to Washington to do more, Winnie!

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I was assuming that the wet lab work would go on the biofab forum and that EDGE would play a (smaller) part in helping host the conversation around the wet lab work, both live (eg. hosting a local workshop like the OpenCare one when I first joined you in Brussels) and online (eg. welcoming people, hosting community calls). Basically to make connections between the layers.

Do you see this as realistic? Just trying to see where activities end and begin, as well as trying to design for maximum interaction. Or is this something we should discuss later and focus on high level now?

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Yes, this works too.

You known why we are so flexible? Because Biofab Forum has Edgeryders under the hood. If people discuss on either of the two platform, we can easily (a) point interested individuals to the right categories, no additional signup required and (b) still do the coding and harvesting with Open Ethnographer + Graphryder. This whitelabelling thing is really an asset!

We will need to give some thinking to how to break down the conversation. Do we want to have:

  • Three separate fora, one for citizen biochemistry, one for citizen ethnography and (maybe) one for citizen experimental econ.
  • One single forum on citizen science .
  • One single forum as a top-level category. divided into three sub-categories.

In the first solution, each category could live on edgeryders mainland or on biofab forum, indifferently. In the second and third, the whole thing needs to live on either mainland of biofab forum.

Also: like in opencare, we are going to need a category where we manage the project. But… the project is about citizen science, and the conversation we want to convene is also about citizen science. So, maybe we could have a fourth category for managing the project, which contains both practical information and a sort of collective notebook on what we are learning. Like with opencare, it would be open to the community too, but here I see an even stronger participation of the community to it.

In opencare/research, 60 of the 90 unique participants are not working for any of the consortium partner. They are people from the much larger (337 participants) opencare forum. At the same time, though, the 30 people who were working for the consortium partners wrote the bulk of the content.

We did not code opencare/research by default. When we found something interesting, we tagged it so that it would get in the coding queue.

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Fully agree about the whitelabelling, but it will need some more work to make it usable. The user experience is still confusing in some regards, especially for less digitally versed people. The ER skin popping up randomly, ER previews when link sharing, confusion when arriving on Edgeryders.eu, … are similar feedbacks we’re getting as how it was with Open Insulin.

So in order to make connections with the broader edgeryders.eu platform during the CCCP, I would make the user experience as though it’s a completely separate website. The first option seems most workable. I’d have only the wet lab science on the BioFab Forum, but a link & explanation in a pinned post somewhere linking to the other project fora. Also regarding the shared accounts.

Perhaps you might consider spinning off the hosting or whitelabelling business under another name, and edgeryders.eu becoming of client of that.

Hosting the conversation on different instances becomes more efficient for the people doing the work, if it’s the same back-end.

All in all I like the way this is turning out!

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Hmm, I see what you mean. Discourse has redundant plumbing, with many ways to go from A to B, and we must find them all to make sure there is proper separation between the various identities of the underlying Discourse instance. I just submitted an issue onto Github, but I am sure it won’t be the last one.

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Great discussion on this. My feeling is one single forum with three sub categories + management. If we want the citizen science of citizen science to be accessible and legible I think let’s community manage in one place that links to biofab for wet data. Offline events can also unfold accordingly i think.

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Related to that, welcoming new members has become more tricky because I can’t tell when someone new came in through biofab or ER. It would be easy enough to make separate messages, but again, no way yet to know which is which.

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I echo that. I’d like to welcome people to biofab, but it’s hardly possible at the moment. Also there’s people I trust to be moderators on BioFab, but it’s very awkward for me to ask @matthias to make them moderators, since they have rights also on the rest of the ER platform. I can’t make that call, except for people I’m close with who anyway don’t have time to moderate.

@anique.yael If we use BioFab Forum for the H2020 proposal, it needs to be disconnected from the other fora I feel like (or with links that are perceived as external). Either the fora are fully part of each other (not a good option for us) or the fora are external to each other. Halfway solutions will become a mess for both platforms in terms of experience.

The Edgeryders platform has been notorious for having a hard selection mechanism when it comes to who gets involved. If you want to host a citizen science ethno research that involves also the unusual suspects, you’ll either have a lot of work or you won’t succeed in retaining a diverse community. And you risk that all your research questions become “does incentive X or technique Y help for overcoming the obstacle that is the platform?” rather than intended as “does incentive X or technique Y help for involving people in citizen science?”

Did you consider hosting the project on a different whitelabel yourself?

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If you trust them to be moderators, what about telling them where they can and cannot go? I guess that is a risky way to find out someone was up to the standard you thought they were.

But right now it breaks the process of welcoming new people since there in no way to differentiate. Conundrum.

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A few things @winnieponcelet

Thanks for breaking this down further although I’m a little worried by what you’re saying here. I think this is one of the reasons I’m inclined to one single fora for all three CCCP labs (wet/ econ/ ethno) on the edgeryders mainland as @alberto spoke of above. That way, community management can do its thing in connecting and threading, and exposing ethno coding across the lab and evaluation layers. I don’t have a strong opinion around a separet CCCP whitelabelled site, although would consider should we have a few H2020 projects going at the same time, and the effects.

On another note, what are you envisioning in terms of realworld sites for WP3 @winnieponcelet ? I had imagined 1. City of Milan, 2. Berlin with @lucy’s community, 3. Switzerland with @rachel’s Hacquerium community and then 4. Ghent/ Reagent’s existing active networks in Belgium.

Our WP is being designed to include support for community managers across the three lab layers (training and PM allocation), and we have agreed to English and Italian with TANT as the two languages.

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There is a major bottleneck: I don’t feel comfortable hosting citizen science on the Edgeryders forum. I have heard 10’s of testimonials of very capable people that are negative about it. Read: people who are at home in citizen science, born with the internet, digitally skilled, … They are pushed away by the platform. They won’t get involved, especially not in their free time. Imagine how it is for people who don’t fit that profile. Eg. people who are outside more often, the exact profile you want for urban farming.

We tried to separate BioFab Forum from Edgeryders as much as possible for that reason. Even then it’s hard to involve people who are none of the above. During workshops and other live interactions all we hear is that an online forum is a barrier in itself. And “what is this Egderyders thing, I don’t understand”.

But I think it’s managable on a platform dedicated to one topic only: biofabrication. Or urban farming.

I don’t see other solutions at the moment.

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I hear you @winnieponcelet . So what you’re saying is that best case is to have wet lab layer on a separate forum (BioFab or otherwise whitelabelled) based on your experiences of citizen scientists and their engagement with data analysis and dialogue online?

This means that we would have the econ and ethno lab layers on edgeryders mainland, funneled through or supported by a project wide forum. Evaluation dialogue would be incorporated there too. And then we have strong community management bringing the wet lab analysis and dialogue into these fora (as above, I’m designing training and PMs into our WP accordingly).

I understand the SSNA would still be possible (ping @alberto)

Agreed?

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Yes, an online forum is a barrier. But in-person ethnography at this scale is an even higher one. So, we go for the lower one. Most people will not get it, and will not participate. That’s OK. It’s always been that way.

@johncoate can tell you how people got on the WELL: get a floppy disk mailed to you, then install software and configure their modem, then endure dial-up speed and a text-only interface. And pay for the service. Of course, most people thought they WELL users were weirdos and would have not been caught dead doing any of this. That’s OK, because the WELL did not need everyone. They only needed a few thousand people to get on board, and they got them. That’s OK for everyone, both participants and non-participants. Free country.

A good rule of thumb is not to go out of your way to accommodate people that will not go out of their own. Those early WELL adopters saw a clear value proposition, and accepted to jump through the hoops of 1980s computer-mediated communication in its name. With online dialogue, 95% of people are just not up for it. They are on Facebook. They are on Whatsapp. They wax lyrical about face-to-face contact. They point to UX glitches, but, in my experience, they are just not interested enough. Nothing you can do will get engaged. This is completely understandable, because written, online dialogue is hard work and not for everybody, including many smart, energetic, articulate people. You still do work on your UX, but you do it to accommodate users, not non-users. The 5% who do see the value.

It’s been the same for me throughout the years. Visioni Urbane, then Kublai, then Edgeryders 1, then Spot The Future, then OpenCare. We used Ning. We used Drupal. We used Wordpress. We used Discourse. We used Second Life, God have mercy on our souls. Identical results: a small minority gets very active and engaged. Everyone else shrugs and goes tight back to hang out with the cool kids. That’s OK, as long as the small minority is, in absolute value, large enough. Which it was, every single time. This is what gets us here, as a coveted partner in H2020 projects.

In practice: Biofab is Discourse: so is Edgeryders. The UX is identical. The tradeoff we are facing is:

  • If we break the four debates across four completely separate platforms (different codebase, different database, no single sign-up), this is more appealing to the “ontologist in our head”. Medieval history has a shelf in the library, business has another. This is a fallacy, because ontology is overrated, but whatever: it is how most people think at a superficial level. So the advantage is that it is initially more intuitive and easier to explain.
  • If we keep them close and “meshed” ( like different cats in the same Discourse instance: one signup, notifications from every topic that you contribute to, across all cats) we make moving from one debate to another easy, like wandering from one group of people to another at a party. We tried this in opencare, with significant spillover (explained above in this post). So the advantage is that, once people are aboard, it makes for a more diverse and richer conversation, with a stronger interdisciplinary stance.
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Can you say more about this? Is it this platform or any platform? Is it because with what free time they have they don’t want to be in an online discussion about work? In short, I don’t quite get the nature of the objections.

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My 2 cents… From the community perspective (eg the community around urban soil bioremediation that we’d like to build from Berlin), the online tools are an extension of the in-person meetings we will have locally. Perhaps a more distributed version of these meetings if our project grows beyond Berlin. This means the conversation there should be focussed on what’s relevant and important for the community and their project. It’s like an online meeting room. If the community keeps getting looped into other/meta conversations a good proportion of them will disengage.

So in my opinion each wet-lab community will need to be able to run their own suite of online tools, to support their own community (local organisational stuff, knowledge sharing, planning and reporting of experiments), in a way that is appropriate to that community. In my experience that’s some form of the following:

  • chat (whatsapp, telegram, signal, SMS group etc) – mainly for the core team for time-sensitive communication
  • forum for non-time-sensitive parallel or threaded discussions (eg discourse, slack)
  • versionable documentation (wiki, github repo, google doc, even zines).
    Specific choices about what platforms to use would depend on whatever is culturally appropriate for the local community.

I think discourse is great for the forum solution, and I can see why it would make sense for the wider project to use the edgeryders instance. But, as @winnieponcelet describes, our science hack day community started using a corner of the opentechschool discourse and I’ve had quite some problems with it that would make me think twice about doing it again (cap on the number of admins, onboarding challenges, confusion with the branding)… these are important issues that we’d have to resolve if we don’t want the platform to be a barrier. It’s not an issue of unwillingness to engage with online platforms - it’s an issue of bandwidth and noise.

My main concern would be about control and longevity for communities that exist beyond the scope of this project. For example, we are also looking at other funding applications for the bioremediation project and intend for it to continue for quite some years to come. How longterm can a community expect to be able to continue on the edgeryders platform…? How much control does the community have over their content? Might there be the option to export the content if it needed to be re-homed elsewhere? Or would it be possible to set up wholly parallel instances of discourse but in such a way that edgeryders can still extract the data it needs for the ethno and econ research.

BUT - I don’t mean any of this to be negative. It’s great that we are having these conversations and taking them seriously… :slight_smile: Looking forward to develop this further.

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That’s quite close to our proposed new solution. Turns out, the current combination of communities into one Discourse platform is not satisfactory, neither from a user’s nor programmer’s perspective …

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I think EDGE can decide what platform and how to use it based on all the input. I trust you’ll make the right call. Have you thought more about it?

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