Connecting with the Crowd is a one day cross-disciplinary conference which aims to explore best practices and new perspectives on crowdsourcing citizen science. The conference will be held on 16 June 2017 at the Natural History Museum in London and is jointly sponsored by the British Ecological Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Crowdsourcing projects and platforms abound, involving over one million citizen scientists in the analysis or interpretation of images and data online.

This conference will showcase the latest tools, technologies and approaches available to engage and collaborate with diverse audiences online. Key elements of the event will be to share lessons learned, and to explore collaborations with social science researchers to understand who makes up ‘the crowd’, how we can best reach, engage and connect with them, and how effective they are at crowdsourcing research data.

This event provides a networking and professional development opportunity for researchers and students from the fields of science, social science and the arts and humanities, as well as practitioners in citizen science and crowdsourcing.

Programme

Keynote speakers:

Professor Chris Lintott, Professor of Astrophysics and co-founder of the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform, University of Oxford

Professor Dan Rubenstein, Professor of Zoology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Director of the Program in African Studies, Princeton University

Other speakers include:

Geoff Belknapp - Science Gossip, Constructing Scientific Communities project (University of Leicester)

Alice Sheppard - ExCiteS (University College London)

Stuart Anderson - SmartSociety (University of Edinburgh)

Phil Stevens - MammalWeb (University of Durham)

Gavin Thomas - Mark My Bird (University of Sheffield)

Visotheary Ung - Les Herbonautes (Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle)

Meghan Ferriter - Crowdsourcing for transcription of digitised collections (Smithsonian Institution)

Helen Hardy - NHM Digital Collections (Natural History Museum)

John Tweddle - Orchid Observers, Constructing Scientific Communities project (Natural History Museum)