From Sharing to Experimenting: How Mobile Technologies Are Helping Ordinary Citizens Regain Their Positions as Scientists

Abstract

Citizen science is a term used to describe the engagement of ordinary citizens in scientific tasks like observation, measurement, and computation. A series of technological innovations, such as the Internet, the upgrade of mobile phones from communication devices to networked mobile personal measurement devices, and the introduction of self-assessment applications to use with them, redefined the activity of citizen science, providing amateur scientists not only with tools to share, but to also record and interpret almost any type of data. These innovations generated an explosion in the number of citizen science projects, with technology on the one hand reducing the need for skills or knowledge which, until then, were a basic requirement to be involved in such projects, while, on the other, guaranteeing that the generated data meets a minimum standard of quality. In this paper we argue that for citizens to become true scientists, a position they used to have before the arrival of the professionals, an additional technological innovation is required to turn mobile devices into tools for experimentation.