How to Design Citizen-Science Activities: A Framework for Implementing Public Engagement Strategies in a Research Project

Many studies have shown that volunteers have the potential to provide a valuable contribution to complex research projects. To reach this outcome, the environment in which contributors are engaged has to be carefully configured to foster collaboration while designing tasks with low interdependence. The broad term defining this integration of external contributions in scientific research is “open/citizen science”. Being this phenomenon relatively innovative in its capillary applications, theoretical frameworks and operative guidelines are still evolving. Our paper aims to contribute to this research field, examining and testing public engagement activities for a robotics research project, HeritageBot (HB). In detail, our paper explores the process of developing collaborative initiatives involving external actors in a set of HB’s scientific research tasks through a set of public engagement, “open”, activities. First, we will propose a theoretical framework that we designed to support our activities, and then, we will compare and select a set of methodologies for designing open/citizen-science strategies. Subsequently, we will focus on empirical episodes in which we were involved while developing HB’s public engagement solutions. Finally, we will introduce the experimental validation process of the identified solutions, showing also a summary of preliminary results.