Post by Chris Santos-Lang, Co-Chair, CSA Ethics Working Group

Have you noticed the risk of reinventing the wheel, wasting precious resources to solve problems that other scientists have already solved? Have you noticed universities and laboratories providing tools which their researchers use to build upon each other’s solutions? Have you noticed that a bunch of those tools fit under the category “Ethics”? 

The purpose of the CSA Ethics Working Group is to provide reusable ethics tools relevant to citizen science analogous to existing tools for non-citizen-science. We have started by building a part of the CSA website where we collect ethics tools to meet all citizen science needs: model codes of ethics, reusable consent forms, free training/certification programs, reusable procedures for ethics review, etc. Please make use of these resources and donate additional tools to our collection.

If you encounter a need not met by these tools, please use our “Digital question and suggestion box” on that page to tell us what we are missing.

This year, we will also begin recording free webinars for the citizen science community (although other scientists may find them just as useful). Call in from anywhere in the world to ask questions and share your own insights:

September 2018: Citizen Science Ethics 101 
November 2018: Stakeholder Analysis 
January 2019: Transparency 
May 2019: Ethics Review

Finally, we invite you to join our Google Group where you can participate in our discussions, including monthly phone conferences, and even become a member of the Ethics Working Group.

The easiest way to find us may be to search the WWW for “citizen science ethics.” If appropriate, please link your own website to the Ethics Working Group section of the CSA website, so we will be even easier to find.

Posted on: September 11, 2018  |  Category: Blog, CSA Blog, CSA Working Groups, Ethics Working Group, News, Webinars