Workshop on Open & Citizen Data Science  (WOCD) Session 2

Abstract: Opening the scientific process for creating knowledge needs opening the access to a number of diverse resources like scientific instruments, scientific data, digital services, software tools, knowledge and expertise, all needed in some form to conduct research. These elements can be regarded as infrastructural resources that are essential inputs to the research process. Making these resources open and shareable require the adoption of standards, the right legal frameworks and license, and clear rules for access. There is also the crucial aspect of defining the appropriate governance and management mechanisms that ensure their long term maintenance and availability. This presentation tackles commoning as the social practice suitable to create systems to manage these shared resources and provides examples in the area of open science. It also identifies some of the current challenges with particular focus on the digital infrastructures. Close

Abstract: Ibercivis (www.ibercivis.es) is the national foundation of Citizen Science in Spain that promotes and supports Citizen Science experiments and studies, delivering services to the communities as well as deploying our own tools and experiences. Our main approach to public engagement is to promote the uptake of Citizen Science tools to enrich research by changing current approaches to scientific challenges and by incorporating knowledge from outside the academia. In the last years, we are facing a boom of Citizen Science practices all around the world. Only from Ibercivis we have deployed more than 50 experiments with over 40 different research groups from different areas of knowledge, reaching over 50.000 volunteers. Our set of experiments include volunteer computing (e.g. simulation of nuclear fusion devices using http://boinc.berkeley.edu), volunteer sensing (e.g. odour nuisances reports http://digitalearthlab.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mygeoss/results3.cfm), volunteer thinking (e.g. stem cells images analysis cellspotting.socientize.eu), participatory experiments (e.g. human behavior in dilemma dilema.ibercivis.es), or collective intelligence projects (e.g. collectivemusicexperiment.eu) among others. One of the main drivers of this scenario is the digitally enabled transformation of the interactions between science and society, facing an unprecedent scale of nature and range of collaborators. We find several models of public engagement in science and contributions occur individually as well as collectively, in all the steps of the scientific workflow. There is a need of having a clear picture of the situation in Europe. Addressing this at national scale, we created the Observatory of Citizen Science in Spain (www.ciencia-ciudadana.es) to monitor the growth of such initiatives, catalogue them and analyze different impacts. Ibercivis was promoted from the BIFI Institute of the University of Zaragoza and includes research institutions and science funders, namely MINECO, CSIC, CIEMAT, Gobierno de Arag?n and Fundaci?n Zaragoza Ciudad del Conocimiento. We are part of the steering committee of the European Citizen Science Association, linking with responsible research and innovation. Since 2012 we coordinate the European project Socientize (www.socientize.eu) which delivered the White Paper on Citizen Science for Europe, referenced as a flagship document for the Citizen Science policy making. In this presentation we will present a significant set of these projects and we will present their outcomes from scientific, educational, political and technological perspectives. Close

Abstract: Between 2001 and 2005, I had the privilege and honour of leading and guiding Gentoo Linux's development teams. That was a period of high growth for Gentoo -- our userbase went from less than a thousand users (about ~750 in the #gentoo IRC channel), to over 1.5 million by 2003. This massive mushrooming of the userbase made its effects felt throughout the project. Due to the nature of the technology and the ethos of the project, Gentoo rapidly started to become the Linux distribution for every kind of situation. Several projects launched within Gentoo -- many of them around supporting different hardware, including: PPC, Sparc, IA64, Arm, and others. Communities formed to help people speaking specific languages (Spanish, French, and Polish were amongst the pioneer communities). Each group had developers within the project, and users interacting with those developers. Interactions (user-user, dev-dev, user-dev) happened in many fora: IRC, email lists, Gentoo Forums, as well as a number of third party online destinations for Linux geeks. Gentoo-fever was all around. We got made fun of: in forums comments everywhere, satirical websites popped up, and of course, our users were die-hard defenders of The Gentoo Way. The challenge of guiding this growth, and considering the perspectives of (at our peak) 250 developers, fell onto the leadership team. As part of that team, I underwent my own growth -- as a developer, a colleague, a friend, and a human being. I would like to tell you my story. Close

Abstract: Nearly all online communities organize co-located meetings, such as conferences, un-conferences, and hackathons. These events are short, fast-paced, yet they are intended to enable social interactions and fast-circulation of informal knowledge between attendants. There is however a dearth of knowledge on the contribution of co-located events to community enhancement and long-term online production. Here, I study a community of astrophysicists involved in open and reproducible data science. Over the span of data collected (4 years), five co-located meetings were organized. Each meeting triggered contrasted immediate effects regarding collaboration, but all of them had significant long-term enhancing effects on community building and online knowledge production. These results illustrate how punctual co-located meetings change the way contributors engage with their community once they have resumed their routine work online. Close

Abstract: Scientific studies are often not reproducible and trustworthy due to false or exaggerated research findings. This current issue creates a bias in which successful studies are often only published through the use of dishonest scientific practices. To approach this issue, a research project has been set up to investigate how the reproducibility and trustworthiness of scientific studies can be improved with the use of the blockchain technology. The blockchain technology has shown adequate results in terms of progressing and logging transactions for the Bitcoin protocol and will be examined within this project for the purpose of logging and tracking preannounced studies. This is the thesis design for the master project ?Using the Blockchain for Reproducible and Trustworthy Science?. First will be explained what the problem statement and context is and how the project is related to other work. Secondly, the research question and the subquestions will be defined, followed by a research methodology that will be used during the research phase. The last section introduces a planning, i.e. a roadmap, that is developed for the project. Close