Community Science

Community science is a variation on a better known theme that you might know as "citizen science". The idea is that "regular" people -citizens or communities- can and should participate in research that contributes to a better understanding of our world. The distinction lies in where the research questions or issues originate. Citizen science is commonly associated with traditional research projects where citizen volunteers participate by gathering or evaluating data. The questions to be answered tend to come from traditional sources in academia or government and the projects are managed by those institutions. Community science extends the idea that "anyone can do real science" by encouraging the involvement of groups that self-organize around an issue or question of special interest to a community. 

But this distinction is somewhat arbitrary. The big question is:

• How does the research get turned into useful knowledge?

This is one of those questions that gets more complicated every time you look at it and I will come back to it again and again in this blog. If you are interested in this topic of "open" research, here are some sources for the information that shapes my thinking on this:

• The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is an established leader in Citizen Science
• Scientific American has a list of active citizen science projects
• The Fourth Paradigm, Data Intensive Scientific Discovery
• A good (readable) paper on open participation in science
• Citizens as Sensors: The World of Volunteered Geography

Community science is sometimes associated with "adaptive management". Adaptive management is a natural resources management methodology that attempts to reduce conflicts in natural resources management by involving stakeholders in an iterative process. The Wikipedia page provides an overview and links to resources.

[Free eBook available on-line from Microsoft Press]

Dozier Jeff, Gale, William B., The Emerging Science of Environmental Applications, The Fourth Paradigm, Data Intensive Scientific Discovery, Edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, and Kristin Tolle, Microsoft Press

Victoria Stodden has written about open science and participatory science. Her blog has links to her work and other resources. I found this paper to be interesting.

[you need access to an academic library for these] 
Carr, A. J. L., 2004, Why Do We All Need Community Science?, Society and Natural Resources, 17:841–849, 2004

Gibbons (1999), SCIENCE'S NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT WITH SOCIETY, Nature 402, C81 (1999), Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Impacts

Goodchild, Michael F., Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography, GeoJournal (2007) 69:211–221