A LEGO owl and hedgehog inspect a journal article with their magnifying glasses

Participatory/community/citizen science has transformed how scientists think about discovery, re-orienting the scientific endeavor toward collaboration with the people of the world rather than an isolated activity for a select few. This participatory approach is changing how we study life on our planet, has garnered a Nobel Prize for fundamental breakthroughs in biology and AI, and is widening pathways into scientific fields.

While the participatory science movement often sees technology as a tool for organizing, our digital environments are as much in need of understanding, joy, and stewardship as our our planet, health, and outer space. 

That’s the idea I was privileged to present at the Association for the Advancement of Participatory Sciences last month together with other researchers, journalists, and organizers at the forefront of work on technology and society: Alan Smith of Consumer Reports, Todd Whitney at the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech program, Sarah Gilbert at CAT Lab, and Brandi Geurkink of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research. Here’s a summary of our talk:

our digital environments are as much in need of understanding, joy, and stewardship as our our planet, health, and outer space 

Speaking to a room of scientists and community leaders who largely study the natural world, we invited them to think about digital technology as an environment, an ecosystem — of phones, platforms, and AI systems. This technology has become a basic part of everything we do- how we find friends, how we learn, get jobs, and participate in our democracies. 

In an article last month in Science, Dr. Amy Orben and I pointed out that tech companies routinely deploying systems to billions of people that extract, exploit, and influence humanity worldwide, even as we lack the science to answer whether a given digital technology or AI system will be harmful or beneficial to society.

How can we develop that science and make it matter? Inspired by participatory environmental science, I founded the Citizens and Technology Lab a decade ago, and we have collaborated with communities of tens of millions of people on science to make our digital worlds fairer, safer, and more understanding. Wonderfully, we’re not alone.

My introduction to this kind of science started in 2015 when I worked with a group facing online violence who built infrastructure to observe Twitter’s responses to harassment reports, supporting research and advocacy for online safety.

Looking for other examples, I learned about Kristy Milland, a gig worker with Amazon Mechanical Turk concerned about fair pay who worked with academics to crowdsource worker data on labor practices to hold Amazon accountable – she now has her JD.

Beyond protecting basic rights and safety, stewards of our digital environments also nurture the environments they love. One example is this large-scale three-continent, four language randomized trial where hundreds of people sent thousands of thank-you messages to Wikipedia contributors and observed cascades of appreciation that strengthened participation and connection on the site.

Just like citizen science organizations work with young people to take on questions that kids case about while training the next generation, technology researchers are doing the same. For example, Avriel Epps, a postdoc at CAT Lab and Civic Science Fellow, has recently published A Kids Book About AI Bias and has taken a position as AI Expert in Residence for Black Girls Code, which runs education programs in 15 cities. 

What connects these efforts? In the last decade, many social scientists, computer scientists, journalists, and communities in crisis have developed innovative research methods to meet people’s direct needs, contribute to science, and where necessary, inform regulators. 

Because this science matters in people’s lives, it also faces opposition. In response, we’re starting to organize. Here, for example, is a group in Berlin who recently took X (formerly Twitter) to court to enforce social media data transparency laws.

This participatory work is already advancing state of the art science- CAT Lab alone has published multiple papers in Nature, Science, PNAS, as well as leading venues in computer science, psychology, and STS literature — and we’re now just one lab among a growing community of researchers around the world.

After this brief introduction, I handed the panel over to our guests, who shared stories, examples, and strategies from their work on participatory science.

Alan Smith at Consumer Reports introduced the nearly century-old consumer organization and the reasons they involve their members in research, product testing, journalistic investigations, and advocacy. He described an amazing array of recent projects that have directly improved the lives of Americans, including:

Next, journalist and technologist Todd Witney shared more about his work as a Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council. Todd described a series of remarkable projects he’s designed and supported over the years, including:

  • Surveillance technology used by police to monitor hip hop artists
  • “Reaching For Air,” an interactive journalism collaboration with Utah’s KUER and the Salt Lake Tribune that incorporated citizen science indoor air pollution monitoring with investigative and public health journalism  

Todd also shared lessons from his experience collaborating with the public as part of journalism.

  • People tell stories, not just sensors or data, so it’s important for journalism to support people to tell their stories
  • When participants are included at all steps of the process, it improves the science and the stories that result
  • Embrace levity- people often make sense of complicated and everyday issues with humor – and participatory science should embrace humor too

Brandi Geurkink of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research spoke about the wider movement of people doing independent research on technology and society, whether they are journalists, community leaders, NGO staff, or academics. She described

  • YouTube Regrets, a project Brandi worked on at the Mozilla Foundation to investigate YouTube’s recommendations. This project invited people from around the world to monitor what YouTube showed them as part of research, advocacy, and accountability. The project ended up cited widely in the media, mentioned in a U.S. Supreme Court case, and cited in legislation like the Digital Services Act, which mandates that platforms share transparency data with independent researchers.
  • The Coalition for Independent Technology Research,  a coalition of more than 450 independent researchers across more than 40 countries who work together to advance, defend and sustain the right to ethically study the societal impacts of technology. Many Coalition members use participatory methods to ask public-interest questions that tech companies find uncomfortable or inconvenient. 
  • Key issues that the Coalition is working on, including:
    • Barriers to transparency information for researchers and even users of technology products introduced by tech companies
    • Retaliation by companies toward researchers
    • Precarious funding and sustainability for researchers and our organizations
  • The Coalition’s main areas of effort, including
    • Defending researchers who face retaliation
    • Building the power and influence of independent researchers
    • Correcting the information asymmetry that shields tech companies from accountability

CAT Lab’s Research Director Sarah Gilbert concluded the session, sharing stories and examples of participatory research with communities on the online platform Reddit. Building on a systematic review of over seven hundred studies, as well as her own experience, Sarah described:

  • Why online platforms like Reddit are so popular with resarchers
  • Why so few researchers (6.1%) mention informed consent in their research protocols, despite generally pro-research participants’ frustrations when researchers collect data without asking
  • How researchers can work together with online communities to develop research that makes a difference, based on examples from Sarah’s qualitative research and CAT Lab’s collaborative field experiments

We ended the session in a conversation with participants on ways to build bridges between the larger community of participatory researchers and those of us who study technology and society.

I am so grateful to the AAPS for hosting us at their conference, and I learned so much from the experience on everything from practical processes for collaborative research to organizational strategies for tenure, promotion, and administration. I hope this is just the beginning of a longer, richer conversation!