Citizen Science: An Opportunity for Learning in the Networked Society

Seeking to promote science communication, civic engagement, and informal education, citizen science is a genre of research that connects scientists and non-scientists around projects involving science. This meeting point creates opportunities for potential benefits to both sides. Scientists may advance their research and obtain prestigious funding while non-scientists stand to gain enjoyment, new skills, and knowledge. To learn more how these inspiring outcomes can be promoted, we conceptualize citizen science and its myriad stakeholders as an ecology. We complement this metaphor with the term mutualism to express our desire for interactions in which all parties benefit from their involvement and propose a Mutualistic Ecology of Citizen Science (MECS) as an analytic framework that can potentially contribute to the design and conceptualization of learning in citizen science projects. In this chapter, we operationalize this framework, using four lenses that span several disciplines to look at potential benefits to different participants.