How can prospective citizen scientists find projects and partners and organize their work? A platform co-designed by professional researchers, citizens, activists, and other stakeholders offers an answer.
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Mariana lives in Lisbon. But her apartment was converted into short-term housing to accommodate a growing influx of tourists. Elisa and Frédéric are historians, interested in understanding how central Lisbon has been transformed by tourism practices. Susana is an activist concerned about the social and environmental consequences of mass tourism in the region. Vasco is the president of the civil parish of Santo António (in central Lisbon) and must deal with the area’s drastic and rapid transformation. Camilo is an anthropologist who wants to understand how all of them can do research together.
These diverse social actors’ shared interest in the same societal challenge—mass tourism’s impact on the urban community of Santo António in Lisbon—led them to join a participatory research project called Cidade (In)visível. Turismo e outras práticas quotidianas em Lisboa ((In)visible City. Tourism and other everyday practices in Lisbon). The group combined different approaches: archival research, ethnographic walks, workshops, focus groups, individual interviews, and photovoice (residents received cameras with which to take pictures and then discussed the challenges of tourism). They tackled questions: How to work together in practical terms? Where to organize the project details? Where to store data? How to communicate among themselves? How to look for funding for the project’s activities?
Their work was part of one of the ten pilot projects of a European Union-funded initiative called COESO (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) that focused on advancing participatory research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), which one of us, Alessia, coordinated. COESO participants tried to address the questions raised by the Lisbon group by co-designing a digital platform for facilitating and giving visibility to participatory citizen science. This platform, called VERA (Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation), became COESO’s main outcome. It is now managed by OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for the Social Sciences and Humanities), a not-for-profit research infrastructure where one of us, Carol, serves as Service Marketing and Community Outreach officer.
All ten of the COESO pilots were small-scale projects like the Lisbon one, highly collaborative, and very local. VERA was a co-creation of professional researchers like Frédéric, Elisa, Camilo, citizens like Mariana, policymakers like Vasco, activists like Susana, and other important stakeholders (journalists, artists).
The VERA design process was a back-and-forth between abstraction and implementation with three main pillars: user involvement, lean approach, and fast development iterations. End users (mainly the COESO pilots’ members and, in the last phase, other members of the European citizen science community) were involved throughout the co-design activities, and their needs and requirements were always prioritized. COESO’s coordinators together with experts from Net7, the partner responsible for the technical development of VERA, led the work using diverse methods, namely benchmark analysis, digital ethnography, user interviews, and co-design workshops.
From the benchmark analysis, VERA’s developers understood the necessity of captivating landing pages with clear instructions on how the platform works, short tutorials on project creation, and making sure the platform supports the building of a citizen science community within and beyond participatory project teams.
During the “netnography” or digital ethnography (a method that borrows research tools from anthropology to study interactions in online communities) process, observations were made on Reddit posts (r/citizenscience), the Citizen Science MUSE (Museum of Science, Trento, Italy) Facebook group, and user forums on the citizen science platforms iNaturalist and Eu-Citizen.Science. Although these are platforms supporting contributory projects or collective discussions, and VERA is a participatory platform, this analysis led to the identification of common challenges: bridging physical and digital spaces, allowing flexible project timelines, and supporting knowledge and resource sharing. VERA had to address them as it fit into the larger ecosystem of citizen science practices.
The user interviews with the COESO pilots’ members were another key part of the co-design phase: they confirmed insights from the digital ethnography process including the desire for more resources (e.g. tutorials), the funding issues, the poor findability of citizen science projects, the need for hybrid spaces (physical and digital) to create opportunities for interdisciplinary skills and knowledge sharing, the importance of division of labor within teams, and the crucial role of a local connection to demonstrate the value of and inspire passion for projects.
Interested stakeholders within the European citizen science community also took part in three workshops. One of the workshops led to the definition of the tools and categories of tools that users can find in the platform at each project’s management level.
This co-creation process has resulted in a collaborative platform with tools that allow users to discover potential partners and citizen science projects involving the social sciences and humanities, manage such projects, and find tailored funding opportunities.
After a VERA user creates a project page with a detailed description, the matchmaking tool can suggest partners. A prospective collaborator can also use VERA to browse projects and find the best fit. Another feature provides guidance on cooperation practices, allowing a user to choose within a catalog of tools for tasks such as managing meetings, storing data, and instant messaging that were identified during the co-design workshops. A connection between VERA and the funding platform FundIt enables VERA to suggest funding opportunities tailored to SSH and citizen science.
Very local initiatives, such as the mass tourism project in Lisbon, are common in citizen science, especially in SSH. Normally, they are conducted in the local languages rather than in English. For this reason, the user experience in the platform is currently available in nine languages, a number that will increase in the coming months.
VERA can’t be isolated from the larger ecosystem of services in support of SSH citizen science. Thus, it is connected to the EU Citizen Science Platform, which provides information about more than 300 citizen science projects across Europe. VERA is also connected to GoTriple, a discovery platform indexing more than 18 million publications and 23 thousand research projects from the SSH domain.
VERA entered the production phase at the end of 2023, and the platform is under continuous development based on the community’s feedback. As noted earlier, the platform is managed by OPERAS. Community-driven, OPERAS provides services that help improve how researchers share knowledge, empowering scholars to innovate and collaborate.
It is time to expand the network around the platform, allowing a larger community to take advantage of VERA’s functionalities and contribute to its continuous improvement. In this expansion, it is important to reinforce the connection between digital and physical spaces—namely libraries. For example, VERA can help librarians in their work of supporting researchers and other citizen science practitioners to find and connect with people working on similar topics, expanding the scope of their projects.
VERA is already showcasing diverse projects in participatory research. Mass tourism in Lisbon is just one example. Will you add to the list?
10.1146/katina-20250205-1
