Between Freedom and Regulation: Investigating Community Standards for Enhancing Scientific Robustness of Citizen Science

Abstract

Increasingly, non-expert users engage with technology applications to collect data about their external environment or their own physical conditions. The practice is labelled ‘Citizen Science’, meaning participatory initiatives aimed at including laymen in knowledge production regarding complex issues, such as environmental health risks (e.g. radiation and air pollution, as illustrated by the cases presented). Citizen Science finds its justification in a number of rights, such as the citizens’ right to live in a healthy environment and the right to environmental information. Yet the legitimacy of these initiatives is often challenged as they may not follow scientific standards and expert opinion. Despite the fact that the potential of Citizen Science to provide new evidence to risk governance has been demonstrated in a number of cases, e.g. remarkably in the Safecast radiation monitoring case, the validity of Citizen Science-produced data is still questioned. One solution for enhancing the scientific robustness of such grassroots initiatives would be to have them regulated by scientific standards. However, regulating Citizen Science may deprive it of its ‘grassroots’ nature. An alternative would be the application of ‘community standards’, namely norms ensuring the validity of the data produced by the citizen scientists but developed ‘from below’, from within the community itself. The chapter will explore the two alternatives and verify whether community standards could be accepted as a way of regulating Citizen Science, in order to ultimately improve its scientific robustness.