Thanks for the many interesting submissions and your paticipation in the SPOTTERON Citizen Science contest for getting a free App in Europe! We are finally able to announce the winner (and a follow up project as second place) here on our Citizen Science blog:
Hello there Frankfurt!
This Thursday and Friday, on the 6th and 7th of September, we will be in Frankfurt for the annual meetup of the German Citizen Science Community, the "Forum Citizen Science". We will be present during the entire conference, host a workshop and will also have a SPOTTERON stand.
We are happy to welcome a new project to the SPOTTERON platform this month. As you can tell by the name, „Brushturkeys - birds in suburbia“ is all about Australian Brushturkeys extending their natural habitat, which usually includes rainforests and woodlands, to suburban areas.
We recently added something new as part of all SPOTTERON packages: a short app-manual for all interactive Citizen Science projects on the platform.
Communication is an important factor in the Citizen Science field, not only within the projects themselves, but also among project leaders. For this purpose we implemented a forum on our website in the summer of 2018, which internally functions as a platform for exchange, networking and feedback.
From 15th to 19th of October, the Citizen Science Summer School "Citizen Science in Theory and Practice" took place in "Grünau im Almtal", a small town in the south of Upper Austria. Grünau is particular famous for the KLF, the "Konrad Lorenz Reseach Station" where zoologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz studied animal behavior and became one of the founders of modern ethology. Not far from the research station, a whole week was dedicated to Citizen Science and many interesting
With the new SPOTTERON platform version 2.5 we bring two more highlights to all apps on the Citizen Science platform: First of all, the Offline Maps & Spots feature allows users to download map areas and spots on their phone for having them present, even when there is no internet connection available. This feature is a big improvement, specially for Citizen Science Apps, in which the main activity takes place often outdoors in the field where web connectivitiy is not always a given thing.
Last week it was time for the annual European Researchers Night, a mega event which takes place simultaneously in hundreds of cities all over Europe, again. Of course we couldn't miss it and went to the event at the TGM in the 20th district of Vienna.
We were very proud to see that the latest Citizen Science project to join the SPOTTERON platform and also winner of the Australian Citizen Science Conference competition was featured on Australian news last week.
Thanks for all the CitizenScience! We wish you a happy New Year's Eve and many more exciting #CitSci moments in the upcoming year. We have already new projects coming up, the first one about light pollution and Citizen Science will be ready in 1st of February. But for now, we are off until the end of first week of the new year - see you in 2019!
We are very happy to be featured in the new Citizen Sience 4.0 article by Maximilian Ueberham in the gis.Business magazine (Ausgabe 01/2019). After a short introduction about Citizen Science author Maximilian Ueberham presents Citizen Sience projects, including the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform.
On Wednesday, the 6th of March, the first "Day of Phenology" took place at the ZAMG in Vienna. We have also been invited by one of our project partners from the "Naturkalender App".
Today marks the release day for our Citizen Science interview series! Continuously we are going to publish interviews with different head of projects running on the SPOTTERON Platform.
Last week, the Austrian Citizen Science conference took place in Obergurgl, Tyrolia and we took the occasion to arrive one day earlier to visit the mountainside and get a good view of the impressive landscape surrounding the area.As Citizen Scientists, we always love to stumble apon new things to record and contribute in various scientific projects.
During summer, many conferences on Citizen Science and other events are happening. To spread the word about Citizen Science and share our experience in creating interactive Citizen Science apps, we had quite a schedule this year..
2019 has been an amazing year. The SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform evolved into an even more professional solution for participatory science applications. In summer, we organized the "SPOTTERON Feature Ecosystem" into various thematic packages for a better overview of what the platform brings to every new Citizen Science project. Furthermore, we were able to welcome new project partners from all across Europe, Australia and the United States of America on SPOTTERON.
On Saturday last week, I was on a walk outside to get a little bit of sunshine. But since Citizen Science became a significant thing in my life, these rounds are not only for stretching my legs. With the smartphone in my pocket and a bunch of Citizen Science Apps installed, every walk feels like an adventure.
Our Citizen Science partner "Konrad Lorenz Research Center", running the Citizen Science App "Forschen im Almtal" on the SPOTTERON Platform and initiator of "NestCams", our first collaboration with Zooniverse, started a great initiative. At their research station, they host a colony of Northern Bald Ibis, amazing birds which you can also observe in the "Forschen I'm Almtal" Citizen Science App.
Making complex information easy to understand not just to scientists but also to citizens is an art form, especially when it comes to describing things or places very few among us have ever seen or experienced: space.
From 6th to 10th of September, the European Citizen Science Conference ECSA 2020 took place in the virtual space. Since we have been designing and developing the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform for apps and interactive toolkits since 2014 already, it was not our first conference on Citizen Science - at least for Philipp, who is quite a regular in terms of visiting conferences. But this year, things rarely have been normal, and so the virtual event of ECSA 2020 was something new to all of us
