INCENTIVE & TIME4CS Final Conference

Grounding CS in Research Institutions:

Science with and for Citizens

On the 1st of November 2023, the two Horizon 2020 projects INCENTIVE and TIME4CS organized their Joint Final Conference, at the DesignLab of the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. The Conference took place right after the Citizen Science for Health Conference also organized by the University of Twente. Below you can find useful material and resources from the Conference, as well as (re)live the experience by watching our recorded sessions.

📅 1 November 2023, ⏲️ 09:00 – 17:30 CET

🚩 DesignLab, University of Twente (NL)

The host of the event was Janine Swaak, from the University of Twente, and the conference was divided into two main parts. The first part started with a welcoming speech by Sabine Wildevuur, the coordinator of INCENTIVE. After that, the floor was given to our keynote speaker, Dr. Uta Wehn for her presenation entitled “Do Research Institutions in Europe need Citizen Science?”

Next, the two projects were introduced to the audience by Alessio Livio Spera (TIME4CS – APRE) and Maya van den Berg (INCENTIVE – University of Twente) with a special focus on lessons learnt from this almost 3-year experience. Next, we dived deeper into the work of the two projects, presenting a 5-step methodology of a common journey towards institutionalising Citizen Science in RPFOs around Europe. You can find more details about the agenda of the event here.

Just as we started in the kick-off meeting back in February 2021, we had the pleasure to have our cartoonist, Michiel van de Pol, with us for the whole day of the conference. Through his creative and humorous perspective, he gave shape and form to our discussions which you can see below.

The second part of the event focused on stimulating interaction and discussion around the topics discussed during the first part. In particular, a series of interactive sessions were implemented in parallel and corresponded to some of the steps. The purpose was to make participants experience some of the activities that the two projects implemented during their lifetime.

Finally, the conference concluded with an interactive panel discussion, formed by several experts in the field.

Τhe panelists, including the keynote speaker, Dr. Uta Wehn, Barend van der Meulen, representatives of both projects and especially from the Advisory Board members of INCENTIVE, namely Egle Butkeviciene, Norbert Steinhaus, Giacomo Biraghi, Dr. Patricia Faasse and Francois Grey (online), gave their concluding remarks on the topics discussed during the conference.