Co-creation in practice: from bottom up to top down

Abstract

Co-created citizen science projects are considered to enhance active, inclusive, and wide participation, and significantly improve the quality of public participation. However, fully co-created projects are still rare in citizen science (CS), where many projects aim primarily at overcoming the capacity of current research structures and involve participants only for the collection, and sometimes the analysis, of large-scale data. In addition, in many research areas professional researchers are used to having full control of their methodology and processes; in the majority of cases, they consider CS late in the process, when they already have a clear and well-defined idea of their research plans and needs, with little or no space left for the contribution of citizens. How can the citizen science community of practitioners better encourage and support real co-creation? This paper discusses a workshop at the Engaging Citizen Science Conference 2022 in which the authors shared their experiences of co-created CS projects from three existing CS centers: the Citizen Science Center in Zürich (Mondardini, Director), the Citizen Science Lab in Leiden (Gold, Coordinator) and the Citizen Science Knowledge Center at Southern Denmark University in Odense (Kaarsted, Deputy Library Director).