ACTION achieved the following:
We have supported 17 pilots, 16 of which were completed. Between them, they address light, soil, water, air, and noise pollution, and engaged over 1200 participants. They received a combined 200,000€ of funding, and were further supported through a variety of trainings, webinars, workshops, and advice.
We have created a variety of tools, including Coney, ASSET, and the ACTION open data portal. We provided further guidance for both our and previously existing tools to our pilots, depending on their individual needs. We supported their implementation of processes through Epicollect, Zooniverse, Grafana, and other established platforms. All tools that were considered useful by ACTION partners and pilots are also included in the ACTION toolkit, alongside insight and guidance on how to best use them throughout the participatory science lifecycle, and tutorials and webinars developed by ACTION. The toolkit also hosts ACTIONs insight for citizen scientists about citizen scientist motivation and engagement, data processing and quality, ethics, and policy outreach.
ACTION has assessed the impact of not only the project as a whole, but also of all our pilots. We have provided pilots with guidance and discussion about their impact and sustainability through a number of workshops and webinars. The ACTION Policy Masterclasses especially helped our pilots to promote their work to policy makers, both in the short- and long-term. Partners of the ACTION consortium have further continued work with five of the ACTION pilots (Citicomplastic, In My Backyard, Dragonflies and Pesticides, Restart Data Workbench, and Walk Up Aniene) for new Horizon 2020/Europe grants proposals.
The ACTION toolkit has undergone three iterations, with a variety of stakeholders providing feedback and input, including in two workshops open to consortium partners, pilots, and external experts, and a social media campaign to reach additional citizen scientists. All insight generated within ACTION, and in the wider research community (where relevant) were included in the final version of the toolkit.
We have presented ACTION in a variety of events, and been invited to demonstrate our work for various stakeholders. The ACTION Impact Assessment and Open Call methodologies especially have been interesting for numerous other research projects, to which we have presented them, and shared relevant insight and documentation. The ACTION model will be continued and scaled up to 125 citizen science pilots in the Impetus project.
ACTION has successfully promoted an inclusive and participatory model of citizen science, and communicated this through the citizen science lifecycle, toolkit, our events and publications. The ACTION pilots have benefitted from this and become more open, i.e. in terms of gender balance and inclusion, and with their primary impact on social and environmental issues. The ACTION toolkit will ensure more projects can follow our guidance in the future; it will further be expanded through the Impetus project in the future.
