#CitSocSci-Swarm - exploring the potential of citizen social science through rapid prototyping

#CitSocSci Swarm

Hosted by Nominet Trust at Mozilla

Hackspace - Friday 28 March

9.30am to 5.30pm

The challenge on the project is twofold

1. To work with 3-4 social ventures, charities, NGOs, social businesses who have a social challenge that they believe citizens could help solve by either generating better data around it or analysing existing data.

2. To develop a set of ideas, concepts and prototypes against these challenges that demonstrate the potential of a citizen science-based approach to solve social problems.

The prototypes developed will help point the way to future opportunities and if successful, will be used to develop projects, funding and support to accelerate innovation in this exciting area.

So, what’s happened so far?

To kick things off, we’ve been doing some exploratory research into the topic and have:

1. Pulled together a brief background you can scan through quickly here

2. Identified 5 key questions we’re looking to address here

If you have ideas, or your organisation might have a suitable data generation and/or analysis challenge that the public could help with, then submit them to the site. We will be sharing these challenges as we receive them.

What next?

We’re now seeking applications for 30 or so unique people to come and build something awesome over a day - a diverse and motley crew of makers and doers.

It will take all sorts of experts from different disciplines to make this work - web developers, citizen scientists, games developers, mobile developers, social scientists, anthropologists, digital UI/UX designers, strategists, data scientists, data visualisers.

It’s a free event and there will be some goodies, food, drinks, music and a chance to meet and work with fellow pioneers on creating a whole sector in a cutting edge hack-space. Depending on what emerges, there may well also be an opportunity to stay involved in helping them turn to reality.

How will it work?

We have limited spaces for this Swarm so please register here and we’ll be in touch with successful applicants to confirm your place on the following timeline:

Now to 14 March – Register your interest in attending on the 28th stating what you can add/bring to the challenge. When registering please tell us your idea or problem that could be solved via citizen science techniques?

14 March – We will share the final challenges/ventures to be explored at the Swarm.

14-21 March – We will notify people as to whether they have been successful in securing a space on the Swarm.

28 March 9:30 to 5:30 –#CitSocSci Swarm at Mozilla Hackspace.

The day will kick off with a briefing from the challenges, self-organising around these and will flow straight through into a rapid prototyping/hacking sprint in small teams, with a show and tell at 4pm and drinks from 5.30pm.

Are you up for shaping the future of a whole new way to solve social challenges? If so, get involved, we look forward to hearing your ideas!

Tweet #CitSocSci to join the discussion.

Find out more by visiting citizensocialscience.org.uk