Citizen Science Solution Kit

The Citizen Science Solution Kit (CSSK) is a set of tools for developing and running crowdsourcing projects, maintained by the Crowd4SDG partners. The tools enable you to conceive, design and launch your own online crowdsourcing project without any coding skills.

There are currently four CSSK tools supported by the Crowd4SDG partners.

CSLogger is a customisable phone app for gathering citizen science data.

CS Project Builder enables creation of web apps for classifying images, videos and more.

Decidim4CS is a platform for public deliberation and collective decision-making.

VIsualCit is an AI-enhanced tool for extracting data about specific events from Twitter.

More information about these tools is provided below, along with links to technical fact sheets and short videos about each tool. A Guide to Challenge Based Innovation Workshops for Citizen Science provides inspiration for how to organize a workshop for prototyping solutions using these tools.

In addition to the CSSK tools, Crowd4SDG developed Crowdnalysis, a software library for the aggregation and statistical analysis of the crowdsourced data gathered by CSPB. Crowd4SDG partners used two project tracking and evaluation tools: CoSo (Collaborative Sonar) is a platform dedicated to the monitoring and contextualisation of team interactions; Inn Progress is a platform for documenting projects in a step-by-step fashion.

CS Logger

CS Logger is an open source data collection platform that makes it easy for anyone, even without prior programming or app design experience, to build and configure customized mobile apps (iOS and Android) for their Citizen Science projects. The mobile apps feature the most common functionalities for CS projects that require data collection, for example taking geo-located images and adding additional information based on survey questions. A simple web interface offers a menu of several ready-to-use components for the mobile app, including geolocated image/video/audio and several kinds of text-based questions/entries.
 
CS Logger is based on an open source solution, MindLogger, developed by the Child Mind Institute. The development was done in partnership with the ETH Library Lab at ETH Zürich. Part of the research plan for Crowd4SDG is to integrate the CS Project Builder (see below) and CS Logger backends to provide users with an infrastructure where data collected with CS Logger can be seamlessly analysed in CS Project Builder.

Citizen Science Project Builder

The Citizen Science Project Builder is a web-based tool that allows volunteers to participate in complex data classification tasks that automatic tools cannot handle. It supports projects where citizens can analyze or enrich existing data, typically large sets of images or texts, such as satellite pictures or social media posts, as well as other media formats such as videos and scanned documents. 

Citizen Science Project Builder also enables the development of CS projects that involve data classification, using a project-building interface that does not require any coding skills. The web interface is based on Crowdcrafting, a project launched in 2011 by Citizen Cyberlab, which with its underlying PyBossa open source software framework was spun out as part of the European SME SciFabric in 2015. The software is publicly available under ‘Citizen Science Center Zurich’ on Github.

Decidim4CS

Co-creation of a citizen science (CS) project requires citizens and scientists to self-organize, propose and discuss ideas, schedule meetings, conduct surveys, and much more. Decidim4CS is a digital platform for participatory citizen science and constitutes the deliberation technology used in the Crowd4SDG project. It allows citizen scientists to take an active role in CS project design and execution by making proposals, participating in ongoing debates or starting new ones, attending online meetings, making collective and democratic decisions through voting, and monitoring the implementations of these decisions.

Decidim4CS is based on decidim (‘we decide’ in Catalan), a free open-source software originally created by the Barcelona City Hall as a participatory democracy platform for cities and organizations. The source code of Decidim4CS is publicly available under the ‘Crowd4SDG’ organization on GitHub.

VisualCit

Getting first-hand information about an emergency situation while it is happening is important, but is often difficult to obtain in a timely fashion. The image-based social sensing tool VisualCit allows extraction of visual evidence about a situation from Twitter by searching for images posted and geolocating them. Using AI methods, VisualCit enables the user to crawl Twitter with user-defined keywords to search for posts with images.

VisualCit can apply selected filters (e.g. contains photo, occurs outdoors etc.). It can associate locations to posts, even if tweets are not natively geolocated. Posts can be evaluated by crowdsourcing initiatives using the PyBossa platform (same technology as Citizen Science Project Builder above). A collection of images for a location or thematic maps can be created to support interested users.

For further information on the tools, please refer to the CSSK page on Github.