How to Design Citizen-science Activities: a Framework for Implementing Public Engagement Strategies in a Research Project

The widespread use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has enabled the possibility to open some tasks of a research project also to amateurs (non-academic or scientific actors). This phenomenon has emerged in literature as “open/citizen science”, highlighting how non-experts could provide a valuable contribution also to complex research projects if the environment in which they are engaged is carefully designed. However, theoretical frameworks and operative guidelines for developing public engagement activities for citizen science are still forming and so far are not well established. The need for this theoretical and structured work was particularly evident while designing open-citizen science based public engagement strategies as part of a commercially aimed robotics research project: HeritageBot (HB). This paper explores the process shaping the development of collaborative initiatives involving HB’s scientific research team and external actors (e.g. students and companies), focusing on the experience of designing a set of public engagement activities to be integrated within the HeritageBot project. We will overview the project and the theoretical foundations supporting the initiative and the identified methodology. Then, we will describe, through empirical episodes, our action research based approach to public engagement strategy development. Finally, we will introduce the progresses in defining an experimental methodology, instrumental to the validation of the defined strategy.