Impact Indicators | Impact score (max 42) | Average score (of projects on platform) | |
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Society | Activeness | 16 | 22 |
Involvement | 0 | 17 | |
Governance | Policy | 0 | 13 |
Sustainable Development Goals | 0 | 16 | |
Economy | Economic productivity | 0 | 13 |
Financial sustainability | 2 | 19 | |
Environment | Environmental awareness | 0 | 21 |
Environmental footprint | 0 | 13 | |
Science | Scientific productivity | 0 | 18 |
Interdiscplinary science | 0 | 21 |
Society | Involvement | Participants can contribute to many more phases of a project than collecting or analysing data. Think about other phases of the project participants could be involved with in the future, such as sharing the outputs or assessing impact. Remember that different participants will have different interests, knowledge and availability, so try to offer them different levels of involvement and multiple project activities to take part in. |
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Activeness | The activeness of participants within a project is an important aspect of citizen science. Activeness depends on participants being aware that they are contributing to a project, having a lot of responsibility in the project, and being satisfied with the process of participation. This project should ensure that all aspects of activeness have been considered. |
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Governance | Sustainable Development Goals | The Sustainable Development Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all". However, citizen science has a much broader remit, so it is ok that your project does not directly consider them. You can find more information on SDGs here, to see if there are any possible links between their aims and your project. |
Policy | It looks like policy influence might not be a priority for the project. Of course, not every project can affect policy and some projects have a large impact on governance without ever interacting with official policy. If you're interested in the idea of citizen science as a form of socio-technical governance you can read more in this paper. If the project is interested in influencing policy it could find inspiration from example projects in this report. It might not be a viable option if the project has already started, but citizen-science projects most often have success influencing policy when specific policies are considered in the design of the project and policy makers are engaged from the start of the project. |
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Economy | Economic productivity | We know that economic productivity isn't a priority for most citizen-science projects. If you are interested in improving the economic productivity of the project, it might help to fully appraise any potential developments and advances made through the creation of a dedicated IPR plan. This will help reveal any economic potential that might have been overlooked, and support its exploitation. |
Financial sustainability | If the project wants to improve its financial sustainability, it could consider creating an exploitation plan. To reduce recurring investments in technology and the cost per observation, the project could consider using open-source software and tools. |
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Environment | Environmental awareness | Being environmentally aware means understanding how our behaviour impacts the environment and committing to making changes to our activities. The project could do more to educate participants on environmental challenges and contribute to participants' awareness of the natural environment, by explicitly disseminating information on sustainable lifestyles. |
Environmental footprint | The project could do more to decrease its material footprint, take measures to reduce its polluting emissions, or use a sustainable procurement policy. |
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Science | Scientific productivity | It is important to share the outputs of a citizen-science project - through events, media and publications - otherwise learnings will not extend beyond the sphere of the project. Not every citizen-science project has an academic focus on publications. Neverthesless, by publishing the results of the project in peer-reviewed journals, the project could improve its scientific impact. Try to publish in high impact-factor journals so that the publications will be cited more. Perhaps the project could even support students' disseratations or theses in the future. |
Interdiscplinary science | Explicitly promoting interdisciplinary ways of working could increase the impact of the project. There is evidence that interdisciplinarity is statistically significantly and positively associated with research impact (Okamura, 2019), largely through the engagement of a wider audience |