The European Citizen Science Association is a membership and networking organisation for practitioners and researchers of citizen science in Europe. ECSA was founded in 2014 in Germany and is ruled as charitable and member-based professional organization.
History
ECSA was launched in 2013. ECSA has a board of directors, elected by its members, and a collection of professional working groups that establish standards, identify best practices, help to focus research and technology, and explore the ethics of citizen science. In addition, it has an advisory board and a steering committee, which support the executive board..
Vision and mission
At the heart of ECSA’s work is its role as a platform to support the exchange of ideas and experiences around citizen science among practitioners and other interested parties. Other roles include capacity building, promotion and evaluation for citizen science projects. ECSA fosters a vibrant citizen science community across Europe and works closely with its partner organizations, the Citizen Science Association in the USA and the Australian Citizen Science Association.
Activities
It has held general assemblies each year since 2014, at which ECSA members and working groups present their projects and initiatives, and discuss how the organization’s vision can be further developed. The first biannual international ECSA conference was held in Berlin in May 2016. The second international ECSA conference was held in June 2018 in Geneva, where the emphasis was on the role of citizen science for grassroots organizations, for empowering individual citizens and increasing scientific literacy. The next international conference will be held in Trieste in May 2020. ECSA has initiated several strategic capacity-building programmes at the European and national scale, which have led to the development of outputs such as the Socientize Green and White Papers on Citizen Science in Europe and the Greenpaper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany. The EuropeanWhite Paper provided the basis for several actions and policies related to public engagement in science directed by the European Commission, such as the "Science with and for Society" programme 2018-2020. ECSA is an active consortium member in several projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020. These include:
To complement the definition of citizen science, ECSA also developed Ten Principles of Citizen Science, which have been translated into numerous European languages and have been published as a chapter in the open access bookCitizen Science - Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy.
