Toolkits help researchers to plan their citizen science projects more efficiently and provide guidance for successful implementation. Despite the environmental focus of the ACTION toolkit and the WeObserve toolkit, other types of projects can also benefit from them.
ACTION Toolkit
The toolkit of the EU project "ACTION" focuses on Citizen Science against pollution. The toolkit was developed by the ACTION team with expertise in pollution, citizen science, participatory design, social innovation, open science and more. The toolkit is divided into five sections: "Problem definition", "Research Implementation", "Impact and sustainability", "Policy impact" and "Supplementing material" and provides guidance and resources for a wide range of citizen science elements:
- online and offline activities conducted in the planning and execution of citizen science projects, both by project organisers and citizen scientists;
- various and evolving goals and scopes of citizen science projects, which develop over the course of a project, and shift with new insights;
- different stages of project development, from early ideas to initiatives that have resulted in scientific publications and other forms of impacts.
WeObserve-Toolkit
The EU project "WeObserve" dealt with awareness, acceptance and sustainability of Citizens Observatories. The aim was to create a sustainable ecosystem of these observatories. During the project the project team created the WeObserve toolkit with free tools. These are divided into four categories: "Co-designing your observatory", "Training & data collection for environmental monitoring", "Data quality and visualisation" and "Evaluation and advocacy".
More Tools
The website of the OeAD Centre for CItizen Science lists many different tools under the menu item "Citizen Science > Helpful Tools", which are divided into five categories:
- Citizen Science project creation
- Smartphone App creation
- Apps for recording sensor values
- Do-It-Yourself tools
- Editing texts, images, audio and videos
See the other tools