The Citizen Science (CS) Solution Kit

The Kit comprises tools adapted from existing Open Source solutions, that can support a wide range of crowdsourcing projects for the SDGs, ranging from crowd-based data collection and classification to distributed volunteer computing to project design and community mapping tools

The Citizen Science Project Builder (CS PB) is a web-based tool that allows volunteers to collaborate on solving complex data classification tasks that automatic tools cannot handle. It supports projects where citizens can analyze or enrich existing data, typically large sets of images or texts, such as satellite pictures or social media posts, as well as other media formats such as videos and scanned documents.

The point of the PB is to enable people to create such projects with limited technical knowledge of crowdsourcing, and ideally little or no coding skills. The web interface is based on Crowdcrafting, a project launched in 2011 by Citizen Cyberlab, which with its underlying PyBossa software was spun out as part of SciFabric. The CS PB will be launched in early 2020. The software will be made publicly available under the ‘CitizenScienceCenter’ organisation on Github.

SDG Kobo is a data collection system that enables the easy creation of mobile phone apps for collecting data. Typical use of such apps includes taking geo-located images and adding additional information (such as selecting keywords about the image, or answering related questions). Images are then automatically uploaded on a centrally-maintained database when internet connection is available.

The smartphone application and related dashboard for the creation of smartphone projects is a customization of Kobo, the open system initially conceived by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative for data collection in challenging environments.

SDG@home allows volunteers to donate computational resources from their desktop computers, laptops and smartphones, for running SDG-related simulations and machine learning algorithms. Based on BOINC, an open-source middleware for distributed volunteer computing, the platform is hosted at CERN, a partner of Citizen Cyberlab, and takes advantage of the experience from the development and deployment undertaken by Citizen Cyberlab for different generations of CERN’s LHC@Home project, since 2004.

SDG@Home also benefits from the existing community of volunteers already providing thousands of CPU years of simulations to CERN researchers and other BOINC science projects.

Thanks to the established infrastructure and community, CERN can support additional applications for scientists who may have a high-throughput computing problem related to the SDGs.

The SDG in Progress platform allows all innovators to document ongoing projects, or to get inspired by other people’s projects, re-use them or re-purpose them. The platform is based on Build in Progress, originally developed by MIT Media Lab. Compared to other documentation platforms (wikis, Github, etc.), SDG in Progress provides a highly visual overview of how a project was conceived, allowing for easy documentation of the sort of branching that naturally occurs in projects, where different options are explored.

The goal of SDG in Progress is to provide an open repository of SDG projects, many involving crowdsourcing and open data, where students and citizen scientists can share their results and inspire each other. The idea of SDG in Progress is to document creativity, while minimizing redundancy. Reinventing the wheel is not a problem, as long as you can improve it each time.

This CS map monitors online citizen science participation in Europe. It was developed by the University of Geneva for the DIToS EU project. For demonstration purposes, it currently includes information on volunteers activities from all projects active on the Zooniverse platform, the iNaturalist platform and volunteer computing projects related to LHC@home. Based on the open source data visualization plugin Kibana, the platform will in future allow participants of crowdsourcing projects to visualize the activity of the crowdsourcing project they are contributing to, while respecting the privacy of individual contributors.

SDG Market is an initiative to motivate participation in crowdsourcing projects for the SDGs, while at the same time enforcing a robust consensus-based distributed peer-review mechanism. The current instantiation of SDG Market is as a Developers Market Application built on top of the GitHub coding platform. GitHub repositories can be listed as projects on SDG Market. Commits by developers earn tokens, which can be traded on a virtual market for tokens of other projects. Such market transactions aim reveal a crowdsourced value of projects. A future objective is to integrate SDG Market with SDG in Progress, so that more general SDG projects can be promoted this way.