For Citizen Science projects, it is essential to understand the needs of the user and how to design interactive products and apps to guarantee good usability – which is highly involving. Researching and observing should be an experience with added value. Therefore User Journeys are often used in the progress of developing a new Application. 

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.

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.

In today's fast and everchanging world, it can seem tedious to syphon through the haze of information to find the relevant one. A quick search on Google is undoubtedly a good thing, but what if you need the information to be verified as quickly, as possible?
Many users will turn to social media to do that. Why? Because on Twitter, you can find news in real-time. Without much effort, you can verify a piece of information in an instant.

When choosing a name for your Citizen Science app or a project, you're creating a public appearance. You want to make it stand out, and you want people to remember it. Here's a short guideline on how to best achieve precisely that.

It has been six years since we started the first apps on the SPOTTERON platform and what a journey this has been!

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. 

During the iDiv Summer School 2019 "Citizen Science – Innovation in Open Science, Society, and Policy" in Leipzig, Germany, we co-created the concept for a free Citizen Science video called "Explore Citizen Science", which you can download and use freely.

Inspired by the iDiv Summer School 2019, we have created a new public WhatsApp group to serve as a direct communication channel for all members, stakeholders, and academics in Citizen Science.

In a new video series, our partners from Schweiz Forscht portray some of their most dedicated Citizen Scientist on their website.

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..

This spring, the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Germany, organized a photo contest through our Citizen Science App "Landauf, LandApp". Users were encouraged to go on a historical expedition and find out how the cities and their surroundings have changed in the last few decades.

The new platform version 2.7. is going to bring a complete overhaul of the ranking panel with advanced community leaderboards and more statistic tool for all Citizen Science apps on the SPOTTERON platform.

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.

When developing Citizen Science Apps, the usability has a big impact on how well and frequent people use them in the end. The goal for Citizen Science Apps is to become an important part in the everyday lives of their users in the long term, so that users can gain experience and can contribute important data  to scientific projects.

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".

On the 25th of January 2019 the Vienna City Hall hosted the Vienna Ball of Sciences for the 5th time, held under the motto: “Waltz and Science". As Citizen Scientists from SPOTTERON it was a great pleasure, that we had been invited to film the event just as we did the year before.

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!

The next SPOTTERON Update brings 3 new extension for all Citizen Science apps on the platform. One of the new features are the upcoming "User Roles", part of SPOTTERON's data quality pack.

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.