BIFI in its role as coordinator of Ibercivis is the key Ibergrid partner in the area Citizen Science.
Citizen science is a research line that promotes the participation of society in science. The first project that emerged in this framework was Ibercivis, in which citizens may collaborate with basic research by sharing computational resources in their idle computer times.
Among the main objectives of this promising research line are to recognize the potential of citizen science and the role of society, as well as the importance of active participation of citizens in different activities of scientific nature. In recent years, contributions in this regard have been significantly increasing and have a great added value for researchers, in general. BIFI Institute supports and promotes this task, allowing citizens to make use of resources and computational infrastructure through different activities such as data analysis and the development of interesting experiments in diverse scientific fields. In this way, volunteers can engage in research and contribute to science.
Besides developing our own tools, citizen science projects and participatory experiments collaborating with researchers and citizens, the group has coordinated “Socientize”. This project proposed useful policy recommendations as an input for the strategy for Citizen or Public engagement in European science research activities in Horizon 2020. All these proposals are included in the White Paper on Citizen Science for Europe. Several Commission services (including DGs CONNECT, RTD and the JRC) are using this Paper as a reference document.