Outcomes
In 2022, as an outcome of this project, an article on “Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment” was published in Minerva (DOI: 10.1007/s11024-022-09467-8).
In December 2019, Ibrahim Sidi Zakari was a visiting scholar at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany, where he collaborated with Robert Lepenies and Lisa Herzog as well as with local researchers in the field of environmental politics, statistical modeling and urban sociology. The team worked on the problem of air pollution, its impact on health, recruitment of volunteers for crowdsourcing activities as well as the optimal sample size. They also addressed practical and ethical questions related to data collection, validation, processing of data from citizen science initiatives and their management, and reached out to open source platforms. With the acquisition of 6 latest generation flow 2 type pollution sensors capable of measuring ultrafine particles, the team was able to do tests locally for short term model testing.
In a spin-off project, the grant work also led to the integration of crowdsourced data on cooking technologies and fuels into mobile and web apps (ENERGY TSAPP) for promoting clean cooking.
In addition to collaborative research, the team also focused on outreach: presenting on the topic at conferences and in papers, and connecting to organizations in Europea and Africa (for example, World Wide Generation to explore possible collaboration on SDG reporting). Due to current pandemic travel and contact restrictions, planned workshops on citizen science in Niger and Germany were put on-hold. The group also linked to and attended meetings of the EU funded project https://www.weobserve.eu/about/.
Publications:
Lepenies, R.; Zakari, I.S. Citizen Science for Transformative Air Quality Policy in Germany and Niger. Sustainability 2021, 13, 3973. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13073973
See a full interim report here, and final report here.