The final event of the Crowd4SDG (Citizen Science for Monitoring Climate Impacts and Achieving Climate Resilience), part of the Horizon 2020 – Science with and for Society, took place with a conference which delivered the results of the project and demonstrated the potential of citizen science for monitoring the SDGs, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals formulated by the United Nations. The event was held at CERN, Geneva, and was attended by over 100 people in the morning, followed by 60 participants in the three hackathons in the afternoon.
Composed of a series of short presentations, panel discussions and hackathons, the day was brimming with content and activities relevant to all, with input throughout from all Crowd4SDG partners, including the Politecnico di Milano, that took part in the project with a research group coordinated by Prof. Barbara Pernici from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering.
Finalists travelled from around the world and had the opportunity to pitch their projects during the day and speak to policy makers and stakeholders about how their projects can continue to develop beyond the end of Crowd4SG.
The morning centered around two sessions of presentations and panel discussions. Session one explored a range of topics: citizen science for monitoring the SDGs, enhancing citizen science tools with AI to improve data quality and leverage social media, and exploring the democratic and economic risks and opportunities for innovations generated by citizen scientists for the SDGs.
Session two centered around mobilising youth for citizen science and climate action, outlining discussions around the following topics: how an open source tool kit can make digital citizen science accessible for everyone, how social media can be used to mobilise youth for the SGDs, using Goodwall as an example, and how challenge-based youth projects can produce impactful outputs for the SDGs.
During the afternoon, three hackathons, organised by members of the Crowd4SDG consortium, were held at CERN IdeaSquare, and centered around the theme of using citizen science tools, and how to expand upon ideas surrounding citizen science and crowdsourced data collection with the SDGs.
One hackathon focused around Future Citizen Debates: Envisioning, designing and creating open deliberation processes, led by Crowd4SDG partner, IIIA-CSIC. The second hackathon, led by Crowd4SDG UNITAR, investigated leveraging citizen science for data-driven policies on sustainable development. The third hackathon which ran in parallel investigated using crowdsourcing tools and digital currencies to transform public participation in climate resilience and research, and was led by PoliMi and ETH/UZH.
Discover some of the projects developed!