Participant Involvement > Submit your ideas (closed Sept 5th)

The conference will stimulate an exchange of ideas and facilitate meaningful conversations that bridge communities to activate participatory research and citizen science, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and including funding challenges and opportunities, by exploring how we might enable, implement and assess these fields of research and innovation.  Learn more about the conference vision on the Participant involvement page.  

Submission Deadline:

August 29, 2023 September 5, 2023 23:59 CET  

We encourage you to submit our ideas as soon as possible to allow you to use the Miro board to share ideas and possibly collaborate with others. The Miro board will close at the end of the day on September 7th. 

How to submit your ideas

On the registration form, you'll be asked if you'd like to suggest a contribution. Click "I want to actively contribute". You'll then be directed to a series of questions to describe your idea. Please have the following pieces of information ready to copy and paste.

1) Title of contribution

2) Description and format of your contribution (250-500 words). You may submit a fully developed idea with a specified format, or you may submit a simple description of the specific topic you would like to share about - all will be added to the Miro board for others to see and make comments or suggestions on. We are open to any format ideas, and we especially encourage interactive formats. Interactive workshops and  panels must fit into either a 60 minute or 80 minute session.  (Please note, a poster session with limited space will take place on Friday afternoon - see program.)

3) Why would you like to contirbute?

4) Lanugage you would like to use (the core of the conference will be held in English, but presentations in other languages are welcome).

If your contriubtion idea is relevant to the questions outlined below, it will be posted on a shared Miro board. You'll then be sent an special invitation allowing you to utilize the Miro board until September 7th. On the Miro board, you'll be invited to read other people's ideas, consider if you'd like to collaborate with any other participants and post ideas for creating a contributions together. Interactive workshops and  panels must fit into either a 60 minute or 80 minute session. After September 7th, all the collected ideas will be used to create the final conference program. As many contributions as possible will be included, but we may need to contact you for follow up questions or suggestions for making your contribution fit even better into the program. 

What kind of contributions are we looking for?

We look forward to your ideas for workshops, panels, presentations, posters, videos, podcasts, other creative exhibits (and any other ideas you may have) that provide input on the following questions:

→ How do we support – “enable” – citizen science? 

PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH, CITIZEN SCIENCE, AND OPEN SCIENCE NETWORKS AND INFRASTRUCTURES

• What is the role of shared open science and responsible research and innovation principles and technologies? How can open and ethical approaches to service development and interoperability support citizen science at the national and European levels?
• What are the challenges and (potential) solutions to enabling collaborative research with and for society, both at the network and infrastructure level? 
• How can connections and synergies among services and infrastructures be strengthened for the benefit of citizen science and participatory research practices?
• How do research funding schemes need to be transformed to enable participatory research? How do the processes within funding agencies need to be transformed to allow for participation in their activities (such as strategy development, call definition, and proposal evaluation)? 

SUPPORT SERVICES FOR PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH AND CITIZEN SCIENCE

• What are the concrete experiences of science shops, libraries, learning centres, citizen science platforms, funding agencies, the European university alliances and other support services in facilitating citizen science and participatory research? 
• How do they support the catalyzation of research demands from civil society? 
• How do they enable research beyond academia, give visibility to projects and practices, support matchmaking, networking and community building, and facilitate interprofessional “translations”, especially for the benefit of those that do not do research on a regular basis?
• How can they nurture new articulations between the local, national and international dimensions, and facilitate scale jump, e.g. by supporting language changes and digital access?

→ How do we do – “implement” – citizen science and participatory research, including ethical participation in the activities of research funders? 

METHODOLOGIES FOR DOING AND TEACHING CITIZEN SCIENCE AND ETHICAL PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES TO RESEARCH, INCLUDING IN FUNDING AGENCIES 

• How do we do participatory research on the ground, especially within the social sciences and the humanities while taking into account ethical considerations?
• What methodologies work within and beyond disciplines? How are we pushing public humanities, participatory action research, cultural participatory research, digital participatory research, and other approaches to meet old and new challenges? 
• How do we do/facilitate/support ethical participation in the activities of funding organisations?
• What are the strengths of formats like citizen science academies, mutual learning exercises and diverse capacity building initiatives to facilitate and raise the profile of citizen science and participatory research, including those fostering participatory approaches to funding?

DATA WORKFLOWS AND COMMUNICATION FORMATS

• How can the (meta-) data produced in citizen science activities enter and be made available via digital open science spaces? How can it be made accessible as an evidence-base to inform policy decisions? 
• How can it be aligned with existing standards and processes, and how might these standards and processes need to change to accommodate citizen generated data? 
• What are the commonalities and differences between the challenges encountered by ethics and research assessment committees, research infrastructures, and citizen science service and platforms, and how might their roles change to address these? 
• What visions exist for fitting innovative scholarly communication formats to citizen science and participatory research, especially those taking into account the non-digital dimensions of many citizen science activities in SSH?

DRIVERS AND BARRIERS FOR IMPLEMENTING, SUPPORTING, AND FUNDING CITIZEN SCIENCE, AS WELL AS PARTICIPATION IN THE PROCESSES OF FUNDING AGENCIES

• What ethical and institutional challenges, but also opportunities, arise when implementing participatory research and participation in the activities of funders?
• What commonalities and differences emerge from different framework conditions, goals, employed methodologies, and collaboration with different stakeholder groups?
• How can participation in research and research funding be made attractive? How can we involve new and underserved communities and empower them to make decisions even in situations with little leeway to do so? How can we do so in typically underserved fields like the social sciences and humanities?
• How do we rethink the roles of ethics and research assessment committees and research infrastructures, and how might they address the changing requirements brought about by participatory approaches to research and research funding?

→ How do we assess and evaluate participatory processes? 

ASSESSING AND EVALUATING PARTICIPATORY PROCESSES 

• What do we want to achieve through participatory research (funding), what can be achieved, and what are the limits of such processes? 
• How do we measure our impacts, generate new impact metrics, and ascertain the quality and integrity of our participatory processes and their results? What might new evaluation paradigms look like that encourage initiatives to (re-)connect research and society while safeguarding the quality of these collaborations?
• Taking into account structural conditions, concrete processes and their outcomes, what role do specific funding tools such as cascade funding, prizes and crowdfunding play, and how can new funding schemes support the specificities of participatory research activities at different scales?
• What practical and ethical frameworks and guidelines do different stakeholders need to assess participatory processes? What role might self-assessment tools and independent lookout systems – such as the French “tiers-veilleurs” (third party watch dogs) – play?