Mobilizing Mass Action through Mobile Devices: Challenges and Opportunities for Science, Policy, and Governance

Citizen science and crowdsourcing have become increasingly popular ways of involving citizens in scientific research and for carrying out a variety of micro-tasks. There are many examples of successful citizen science projects and crowdsourcing platforms including the LandMapp project for community-based land tenure mapping; Moabi, which allows citizens to report illegal logging in the Congo jungles, (both of which have been supported by IIASA and WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature)); and Geo-Wiki, a tool for visualization, crowdsourcing and validation of global land cover, developed at IIASA. This talk will provide a brief overview of citizen science and crowdsourcing followed by the main achievements and lessons learned from the LandMap, Moabi, and Geo-Wiki projects. A number of challenges remain such as how to move citizen participation from data collection to environmental stewardship, and how to scale up these efforts to tap into the large citizen networks and initiatives that are currently ongoing, for example, WWF’s Earth hour, which reaches a billion people. We will discuss these and other challenges in light of new opportunities in climate funding and other new sources of private funding, for green businesses, for instance