Presentation #410.02 in the session “Education and Community Engagement”. Cross-listed as presentation #507.02.
Citizen Science , as the phrase was coined, referred to participation of masses of non-scientific communities to focus on a given theme. The H. R, bill 6414, defined as the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2016, is “To encourage and increase the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science methods within the Federal Government to advance and accelerate scientific research, literacy, and diplomacy, and for other purposes.” In this instance, Citizen Science is defined as “a form of open collaboration in which individuals and organizations participate in the scientific process in various ways, including” all aspects of designing the experiment to collecting, analyzing, interpretation of scientific data. Yet, a successful Citizen Science effort involves several aspects of framework and levels or dimensions, namely, (a): identify a gap in scientific knowledge; ii) gather appropriate community of professional and non-professional communities; iii) utilize latest technologies of the trade and iv) stay in the limelight (publish results; present results at scientific conferences and workshops; interviews, etc). A Citizen Science network can then be built with identical Citizen Science units to identify scientific investigations and provide extension of the scientific method. This is a fast growing trend that helps professional scientists extend the teams to include amateur and public communities to perform research, provide new discoveries and allow analysis of legacy data to obtain new results and man be new investigations. I will illustrate these techniques and highlight several examples Citizen Science networks in the field of astronomy.