Scaling Citizen Science Workshop

Curating, Replicating, Orchestrating, and Propagating Citizen Science across Europe (CROPS) is an EU-funded initiative designed to reform the EU Research & Innovation system to better facilitate the growth of citizen science from small-scale projects to an EU-wide movement. The project aims to embed citizen science within a modern, open-science framework, aligned with the objectives of the five EU Missions. Since it began, the project's focus has evolved from a narrower emphasis on upscaling to a broader and more nuanced approach to scaling, informed by insights from the EU Mutual Learning Exercise report on scaling citizen science.

Scaling Citizen Science: Drawing on insights from the literature review and in line with the goals of the CROPS project, we adopt the term “scaling” to encompass a range of strategies within citizen science defined as:
(i) driving institutional changes through citizen science initiatives, such as policy integration;

(ii) replicating or expanding projects across multiple dimensions, including geographic regions, timeframes, research scopes, participants, data volume, and methodologies;

(iii) promoting cultural shifts and lasting change by transforming values and beliefs such as enhancing trust in science;

(iv) pursuing meaningful outcomes by intentionally scaling down or simplifying projects;

(v) striving to implement two or more of these strategies simultaneously.

One of the main aims of the CROPS project is to develop design protocols for scaling citizen science projects based on the five strategies outlined in the definition above. To achieve this, a user-centered design approach to create practical, action-oriented protocols (guidelines) that can help citizen science projects scale effectively is used. As part of this approach, CROPS undertook a persona development process. Instead of using traditional human-centered personas, they created five project-based personas, each representing a citizen science initiative aligned with one of the five scaling strategies defined above. This decision was made due to challenges in developing meaningful personas from a purely human perspective.

The selection of these five projects was informed by multiple sources: (i) a preliminary screening of 500 citizen science projects conducted within CROPS to assess scaling potential and common project types identified during this process; (ii) input from advisory board members and consortium partners with deep expertise in citizen science; (iii) findings from the initial literature review; (iv) feedback gathered at citizen science events, including the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) Conference and the US-based Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (AAPS) Conference on Advancing Participatory Science (CAPS); and (v) the five EU Missions.
https://crops-cs.eu