Barcelona Ciència

Summary

The Barcelona Ciència program is an initiative of the Barcelona City Council aimed at promoting scientific knowledge and engaging citizens in its advancement.

Specifically, the program seeks to involve citizens in the core tasks of scientific research and to democratize knowledge that is often difficult to access. Beyond simply disseminating content through traditional science communication strategies, the program involves citizens in the early stages of research, in the selection of research lines, and in carrying out tasks typically undertaken by researchers.

Promoting organizations

The entity responsible for this project is the Citizen Science Office, promoted by the Barcelona Institute of Culture of the Barcelona City Council.

The founding group of the Citizen Science Office of Barcelona is made up of the following projects:

Bee-Path, Games for Social Change, and Urban Bees (OpenSystems, University of Barcelona)
RiuNet (Freshwater Ecology and Management Group, University of Barcelona)
Sea Observers (Observadores del Mar, Institute of Marine Sciences, Spanish National Research Council – CSIC)
Mosquito Alert (ICREA – Movement Ecology Lab, CEAB-CSIC and CREAF)
Plant-tes (Aerobiological Information Point, Autonomous University of Barcelona)

The project has received support from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT, 2012) and RecerCaixa (2013–2015).

Objectives

Barcelona Ciència invites all citizens to participate and make their voices heard in the design, processes, and results of scientific research, guided by principles such as ethics, transparency, equality, and open access to knowledge. With this vision, the city sets the stage for science and society to meet, engage in dialogue, understand one another, and move forward together in a shared effort to address the local and global challenges of the 21st century.

From this perspective, the program includes the development of activities and projects aimed at diverse segments of the public, with a strong emphasis on placing knowledge and science at the heart of Barcelona’s cultural offerings.

The program’s goals are structured around seven key areas:

Engaging society by increasing public participation in science and research processes, and enabling citizens to become active agents in the scientific method.
Shaping public opinion by promoting scientific spirit and critical, innovative thinking among Barcelona’s residents, empowering them to make informed, reasoned, and evidence-based decisions on issues involving science, health, technology, or the environment.
Inspiring vocations by creating educational tools that help teachers stay up to date with the latest scientific developments, and offering new pedagogical resources to spark scientific and technological vocations among students through experimentation, participation in citizen science, and direct contact with the research community.
Fostering creativity by promoting artistic and creative sensibilities that stimulate innovative ideas—essential for asking questions, designing experiments, solving complex problems, and applying knowledge—fundamental to scientific and technical progress.
Contributing to knowledge transfer by connecting scientific knowledge generated in research centers and universities with industry and the business sector, encouraging the creation of new opportunities and initiatives that support social and economic development.
Projecting the city by raising the national and international profile of Barcelona and its metropolitan area as a hub for scientific and technological development in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Disseminating knowledge by exploring and testing new formats, methods, and communication strategies that build upon traditional science outreach techniques.

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

Primarily, citizens, who are not only involved and actively participating in the processes of scientific knowledge creation, but also benefit from the outcomes and the transfer of that knowledge. At the same time, public administrations benefit from the return on investment through such knowledge transfer. And finally, the scientific community itself also gains from this approach to generating scientific knowledge.

Results

The Citizen Science Office, launched to manage the project and serve as a bridge with citizens, has developed a decalogue of best practices, outlining the guidelines and criteria that all projects interested in collaborating with this program must follow:

Projects under this decalogue must aim to generate new knowledge through the active participation of citizens in at least one stage of the research process. Citizens must be considered an essential component in carrying out the proposed research.
Projects must ensure participation at one of the following four levels of citizen engagement:
a. Level 1: Crowdsourcing – Citizens collect or process data.
b. Level 2: Distributed intelligence – Citizens interpret the data.
c. Level 3: Participatory science – Citizens participate in defining problems, challenges, and objectives, and in data collection.
d. Level 4: Collaborative science – Citizens co-design the project with the scientific community, aiming for direct impact on their immediate environment and encouraging specific actions in the city.
Projects should ensure that their research has a social and environmental impact, and is capable of providing guidance for public policy, both at the local and national levels.
Projects and the institutions that promote them will support gender equality policies aimed at combating discrimination and harassment based on sex, both within scientific environments and beyond.
As far as possible, projects will strive to:
a. Develop access plans and protocols that are practical and capable of generating a shared repository of open and accessible data.
b. Properly document programming code (through plans and protocols) to build a common and open repository.
c. Maintain an open science policy and use Creative Commons licenses to strengthen replicability.
d. Seek shared experimental platforms, whether in the form of common tools (software and technological plugins) or experiments built from a shared base to ensure sustainable scientific activity.
Project leads will combine rigorous research with integrated communication efforts, carried out organically, to make the research process and its results accessible to non-expert citizens.
Research projects should communicate their results first to the participating citizens, who took part in experiments and fieldwork, before disseminating them to other stakeholders.
All participating groups are invited to support the Office’s community of practice by:
a. Sharing information and keeping other groups informed about the status and interests of their project.
b. Actively participating in the Office’s regular meetings to encourage networking and open, participatory governance.
Projects will actively contribute to the visibility of all other projects within the Office, as well as to cross-cutting activities that may emerge.
All individuals involved are encouraged to foster an environment of trust, collaboration, and non-competition.

Additionally, the decalogue states that projects and their members must adhere to the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) promoted by the European Union, and contribute to the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals.

The Citizen Science Office is dedicated to supporting citizen science initiatives in Barcelona by advising, guiding, and promoting projects that wish to operate in the city and its metropolitan area. It also aims to develop actions that bring science and citizens closer together, and to strengthen connections with new civic and cultural actors. Specifically, its actions focus on offering guidance, engaging new audiences and organizations, fostering mutual learning, and disseminating projects that align with the decalogue.

Challenges

The stable integration of citizen science in educational and research centers is still limited. There is a lack of facilitator profiles, specific training and institutional support. Organizational requirements hinder its implementation and sustainability. In addition, the results obtained are not always disseminated or adequately valued, which limits their social and educational impact.

Evidence of success

In 2012, the Citizen Science Office was launched by bringing together the experiences of its five founding active projects, all of which subscribed to the decalogue of best practices aligned with international standards established by the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

Between 2013 and 2015, the Office introduced citizen science into public libraries through a series of thematic conferences under the program Visions of Science, and initiated a pilot project in schools supported by RecerCaixa. By 2015, the Office’s catalog already included 15 different projects.

In 2016, the program Citizen Science in the Neighborhoods (Ciència Ciutadana als Barris) was launched. In this initiative, residents from different areas of Barcelona conducted real scientific research with a direct impact on their neighborhoods. Public facilities—such as community centers, libraries, and schools—participated actively, serving as hubs for gathering, preparing, and discussing the projects that engaged various community groups.

In 2018, a citywide stakeholder group was created, made up of members from research projects and representatives from the Network of Civic Centers, Barcelona Libraries, the Barcelona Education Consortium, and several municipal departments, including the Open Data Office, the Department of Urban Ecology and Mobility, and the Barcelona Public Health Agency.

Also in 2018, in collaboration with the Barcelona Education Consortium, a specific call for proposals was launched to engage teachers and students, leading to the creation of the program Citizen Science in Schools (Ciència Ciutadana a les Escoles).

To date, a total of 20 projects have been developed with the mediation and support of the Citizen Science Office. Of these, 18 are still active, while 2 have already concluded.