Citizen Cyberlab

Rethinking Public Participation

We develop and study new forms of public participation in research
We initiate projects and organise events that encourage citizens and scientists to collaborate in new ways to solve big challenges

At Citizen Cyberlab, we are developing methods and studying motivations for new forms of public participation in research. We are researchers from a diversity of backgrounds – history, informatics, learning, linguistics, medicine, physics, psychology and more. Jointly, we initiate projects and organise events that encourage citizens and scientists to collaborate in new ways to solve big challenges. From online crowdsourcing to in-person hackathons, we are exploring and expanding the limits of citizen science and human computation.

Citizen Cyberlab is based on a partnership between the European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, the UN Institute for Training and Research, UNITAR, and the University of Geneva.

Projects

Events

Blogs

Partners

People

Vision

Due to rapid global development, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY and SOCIETY are entering today into a new relationship with far-reaching consequences.

At Citizen Cyberlab, we envision a world where the rise of PUBLIC PARTICIPATION in research both radically enhances and profoundly challenges traditional forms of expertise, requiring new modes of understanding and acting.

Missions & Goals

Conceived as a laboratory, Citizen Cyberlab is a place for experimentation on new modes of participatory research and reflection on the role of science and technology in defining citizenship in modern societies.

Our mission is to develop innovative open-source research tools, training and events to empower public involvement in scientific and social research issues, as well as to explore the impact of that involvement and assess its risks and opportunities.

Specific goals for our lab include the integration of crowdsourcing, distributed sensing and artificial intelligence in ways that empower public involvement in tracking progress towards global goals for sustainable development.

Activities

Citizen Cyberlab supports the following activities:

Collaborating: we organize hands-on hackathons that promote public participation in research, and accelerate the adoption of open source technologies for this purpose.

Learning: we do research on the cultural, social, political and ethical dimensions of citizen science and the evolving role of science in society.

Creating: we develop open source tools for public participation in research that involve the Web, mobile phones and low-cost DIY instruments.

Sharing: We provide training about science, technology and citizenship, both online and in the classroom, addressed to the general public, civil society organizations, and schools.