You are welcome to join us for an Apéro-Debate
on Friday March 24th from 7:30pm
at La Paillasse with our special guest Lucy Patterson (cf. bio below).
On Saturday March 25th, the european H2020 DITOs(DoIng TOgether science) project will organize a european citizen science forum Citizen Science & DIY Bio: building the bridge between citizens and institutions. This event is supposed to be a response to criticism of a previous “stakeholder roundtable” organised in Berlin 2016 where very few DIY representatives were able to attend.
It could be argued that the narrative and space of “citizen science” is being dominated by projects initiated from academic institutions, at least in terms of access to funding. Often these projects use the rhetoric of “democratisation of science” whilst the kind of public participation they offer amounts to little more than low-skilled crowdsourcing. In the meantime, bottom-up, community-led citizen science projects that may hold the potential to genuinely embed science in society struggle to survive.

CC-BY-SA Science Hack Day Berlin
How should we respond to this? How do we organise grassroots communities and collaborations with institutions to solve these problems?
We would like to discuss these issues and questions and collect opinions from the community ahead of this event.
Special Guest Lucy Patterson from Berlin :
Lucy is an independent community scientist co-organiser of an annual volunteer-run hackathon, Science Hack Day Berlin and the community that has grown up around it (twice-monthly meet ups), connecting scientists, artists, designers, developers, and enthusiasts for collaborative projects. She will attend to the DITOs project forum on Saturday March 25th invited as one of the DIY representatives.