The South Atlantic Fishery Management Council (“the Council”) has turned to citizen science as one means of addressing known gaps in data used for management. There is general good will towards this approach across Council stakeholders but there is also much on the line, including the trust of fishermen in the research that informs management and the trust of scientists and policy makers in citizen science data. To attend to these concerns, the Council determined to take an unprecedented approach of developing program infrastructure before launching any citizen science projects. Furthermore, they accomplished this through collaborative, multi-stakeholder Advisory Teams.
This offered an unique opportunity to investigate a hard-to-observe but highly recommended technique for citizen science: intentional design, and specifically collaborative design where stakeholders are influential in goal-setting (not just data collection). To inform this design approach, the Council referenced a framework document outlining 17 components for effective citizen science projects in management contexts (Shirk and Bonney 2015). These components, while grounded in evidence-based best practices and practical advice of field experts, had never been tested in action. This research “ground references” framework components for their practical utility.
Research was conducted through participant observation of monthly meetings held by each of the Council’s five “A-Teams,” - those developing infrastructure for supporting and managing Volunteers; Projects/Topics; Data; Communication; and Finance & Infrastructure. Questions that guided the coding of field notes included: How did the A-Team attend to the 17 components? What did the work of the teams reveal that framework components overlooked? What factors facilitated the work of these multi-stakeholder A-Teams to articulate and work towards common goals, in order to collaboratively set up effective citizen science for research, engagement, and management?
Results/Conclusions
Results are presented via interactive layers that illustrate how, collectively, the A-Teams covered each of the 17 components of the design framework. Overlays also reveal areas where teams coordinated efforts on the development of procedures and templates. Results describe how components were brought to life by the unique combination of skills and knowledge represented on multi-stakeholder teams.
This poster will also provide an overview of the products of these A-Teams, now formalized as the Council’s Standard Operating Procedures for citizen science. This work suggests that by understanding, promoting, and maintaining reasonably high and commensurate expectations within and across multi-stakeholder teams, the groundwork can be laid for citizen science that offers a net value for all involved.