Resources

This report is a summary report from the first session of webinars by EIE WG and YouCount held inautumn 2021 that will continue in autumn 2023. The webinars were initially planned as one workshop with youths and stakeholders but were changed to digital webinars due to the pandemic. A final report will be submitted in 2023.

D1.1 stems from the work that has been implemented under Work package (WP) 1 “Task 1.1. Identification and mobilizing of stakeholders at the European and international levels”. This task is aimed at establishing a multilevel platform of stakeholders and seeks to link up the YouCount project to other CS-related projects and organizations.

This deliverable presents an early methodological framework for the hands-on youth citizen social science (Y-CSS) study, describing our plans for data collection and analysis which remain under development, including the YouCount App toolkit that will be piloted in Spring 2022.

This report describes the conceptual framework for youth involved in citizen social science in the YouCount project. Moreover, the report presents the use of citizen social science as a mean for social innovation, highlights the dialogical framework for co-creative youth citizen social science, explores the conceptual and methodological framework for evaluation of the outcomes, and discusses ethical considerations and risk mitigation strategies when conducting youth involved citizen social science.

This project report presents the Internet list of stakeholders to be part of a CSS (citizen social science) network and established link to relevant CS (citizen science) projects and organizations. The deliverable has been developed under Workpackage 1 Task 1.1. Identification and mobilising of stakeholders at the European and international levels. This task is aimed at establishing a multilevel platform of stakeholders and seeks to link up YouCount to other CS-related projects.

The report shortly describes the establishment of collaboration with the local data protection office/ethical approval institutions and the Safety and Ethics Board (SEB) as well as procedures and status of formal ethics approvals of the multiple case-and evaluation studies according to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and national regulations.

The YouCount evaluation design is a multi-method approach that spans across the whole duration of the project in WP4. It is therefore current work in progress, as some methods only just have been implemented and will be analyzed in the future. The deliverable aims at making the research design, as well as the current stand of the evaluative studies, transparent and publicly available. This happens in the spirit of open science, with the goal of doing “Science for and with Society”. Hereby outlined is the theoretical design, the way of carrying it out, and the current stand of each study implementation in the overall project.

This deliverable provides a sample of open data from the YouCount project concerning social inclusion from the research and innovation activities in WP2 (multiple case studies) and WP3 (social inclusion). The sample includes research outputs in terms of case posters from a multiple case study of ten cases within the field of youth citizen social sciences, qualitative data concerning youths’ views on social inclusion and data from the co-creative innovation process of the YouCount App Toolkit.

This 'Project Identity Guidelines' has been created to assist all partners involved in the YouCount project. It provides an overview of the elements that make up the YouCount identity system and presents guidelines for working with them. Through notes and examples, it demonstrates how these elements can be combined to communicate a consistent identity that represents the YouCount project.

The project leaflet is one of the main communication activities within WP5, Dissemination, exploitation and communication which seeks to design and implement an effective and targeted communication and dissemination strategy as expressed in the Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication (DEC) Plan.

It will establish the means to encourage partners to identify their participation in the planned activities. Therefore, the main objective of this deliverable is to set out the strategy to report on the participation of the planned events to monitor the dissemination activities linked to these events and make sure that it happens along the lines of the DEC Plan.

Based on the overall strategy described in the Document of Action (DoA), the Dissemination, Exploitation, and Communication (DEC) plan will be developed to ensure stakeholder engagement at multiple levels. It will draw on the networks, communication channels, and vehicles of the Partners represented in the consortium, aligning with the activities they organize, including the Advisory Board (AB) and European Citizen Science Association (ECSA).

This data management plan (DMP) outlines what data will be collected; how research data will be handled during the project and after finalization; what methodology and standards will be used; whether and how this data will be shared and/or made open; and how the data will be curated and preserved. The DMP is a living document that will be updated throughout the project period as the project evolves.

This deliverable provides a more detailed description of the criteria and procedures that will be used to identify and recruit participants for the project. In particular, it specifies the standards and procedures for the recruitment and consent of young citizen scientists, who will fill the roles of both research participants and researchers.

The YouCount project is a large project with a substantial number of participants that requires proper knowledge management and knowledge transfer throughout the project period and beyond. This intellectual property rights (IPR) plan aims to support good conduct regarding intellectual property (IP) in the project.

According to the DoA, this Deliverable is an attachment to the DEC- plan, and therefore it is intimately linked to it. It will establish the means to encourage partners to identify their participation in the planned activities as defined in table 6 of the DEC plan, ‘Targets for key dissemination activities’. After the mid-term review of the Deliverable in Month 18, the reviewers requested a revision of the deliverable. The requirement consisted of adding (1) the list of events in which the project had participated so far, and (2) the list of events in which the project plans to participate.

This deliverable is part of the H2020 EU YouCount project running from 2021- 2023. It is provided by the ECSA Working group on Empowerment, inclusion, and equity (EIE WG) jointly hosted by the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) and the Living Knowledge Network (LKN) in collaboration with OsloMet as Coordinator and KTU as leader for Work package 1 (WP1) focusing on stakeholder involvement and the development of a conceptual framework for youth citizen social science (Y-CSS).  

This deliverable shares our learnings on youth-centred CSS from the joint webinars by EIE WG and YouCount held in autumn 2021 and September 2023 with a particular focus on the webinar 2023. It has been created with contributions and experiences from youth and youth co-researchers, practitioners and researchers working with youth and relevant stakeholders across 9 European countries. This collective expertise provides important insights for the design of future citizen social science projects with youth, as well as practical suggestions on how to enable and support youth to meaningfully contribute to Y-CSS.

This deliverable includes a presentation of the social innovation analysis of the ten YouCount hands-on citizen social science (CSS) case studies implemented under YouCount WP3 Task 3.3 'Cross-case analysis of local innovation, social change and the innovative potential of CSS'. The cross-case social innovation analysis explored the ten YouCount hands-on CSS case studies as social innovation processes that created new framings for youth social inclusion, provided space for new social encounters for social actors otherwise rarely meet (including most prominently intergenerational encounters), developed new social practices for collaborative research and innovation, and enacted a new temporality compared to conventional social science research. The cross-case social innovation analysis also explored the CSS cases as creating social impacts at multiple levels that included the increased self-confidence of R-YCS, the enhanced sense of accomplishment and pride by R-YCS, the strengthened feeling of social belonging by R-YCS, the establishment of new network constellations, the importance of 'research relationships,' the enactment of a relational approach to doing research, the stakeholders' perspective change on youth, and the future collaborations that were inspired. The technological perspective on the YouCount cases highlighted the role and impacts of technology and digital tools in CSS. The adaptation of these tools had both positive and negative effects on social inclusion, engagement, learning processes and interpersonal interactions. The analysis showed that the normalisation of technology can lead to digital fatigue  – with young people opting for analogue, offline methods  –  and a digital divide  –  when certain members of the CSS research groups need further support in interacting with technology in the research process. Finally, analysing the role of CSS in social innovation revealed that 'CSS as social innovation' can be detected in the YouCount cases as 'enacting CSS as a micro-level social inclusion process' and as 'a relational research approach', while some limitations are also shared. CSS as a tool for social innovation can be demonstrated through the creativity it enables, the 'school of democracy' and empowerment it enacts, the innovative potential it may bring to some sectors (e.g. education, employment), while some cautionary notes are also provided on the paradox of technology mediation. 

This deliverable includes a presentation of the social inclusion cross-case analysis of the 10 YouCount hands-on citizen social science (CSS) case studies. It explores three key empirical research questions: What are young people’s views on the critical issues for social inclusion? What are young people’s experiences with opportunities for social inclusion in their daily lives? What new means and policies to increase social inclusion are needed?This deliverable includes a presentation of the social inclusion cross-case analysis of the 10 YouCount hands-on citizen social science (CSS) case studies. It explores three key empirical research questions: What are young people’s views on the critical issues for social inclusion? What are young people’s experiences with opportunities for social inclusion in their daily lives? What new means and policies to increase social inclusion are needed?The primary source of data for the analysis presented in this deliverable is the final case study reports, based on a common template structuring the analytical dimensions, written by the professional researchers working on the 10 YouCount case studies. In addition, some preliminary findings from the YouCount App data analysis are also integrated.

This article presents an overview of the ecosystem of citizen science development in Lithuania and its potential to address United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). As citizen science is still in the early development stage in Lithuania, this case study is an example of ecosystem analysis in the period of early citizen science adoption.

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How should we go about collaborating with children and adolescents? Young Participation: Creativity and Conflict in Planning explores how youth participation work in practical terms in the context of urban development processes at the municipal level in Norway. From their unique perspectives, social scientists, artists, an architect, and a young contributor discuss experiences and dilemmas of including children, teens, and young adults as contributing stakeholders in various projects. The reader will find concrete examples of participatory processes and tools developed in cooperation. The book is written in Norwegian but provides one chapter in English.

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How can Citizen Science (CS) be engaging? What does engagement entail? Who needs to be engaged? What are the challenges and opportunities of engagement in CS? After two years of lockdown and isolation, these were some of the questions debated by engaged researchers, students, and practitioners at the ‘Engaging Citizen Science Conference 2022’ at Aarhus University, Denmark. This review published in the Journal of Science Communication provides a summary of the conference.

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The article describes the experience of involving young people in two youth participatory research projects on political and social engagement. These research projects are both focused on municipalities in the southern part of the Stockholm region and focus on the methods used to engage representative groups of young people in interdisciplinary research in the context of spatial planning and local politics. The article presents preliminary results and compares and contrasts the types of problems identified by the young people who participated in these projects in relation to their living environments and neighborhoods.

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This article concludes that YouCount, as one of the 7 social science projects out of 28 citizen science projects in Hungary, goes beyond the level of passive, minimal involvement, where volunteers can meaningfully participate in the research process and bring about changes in their environment and communities. Local case studies of the projects Community Archaeology, Citizen Science Mentoring, Creek Rákos citizen science project, Life in undies, PET bottles spotting, Air working group, and YouCount are succeeding in involving certain communities in the research process in ways in which participants could contribute to framing the research questions, creative research outputs as well as publications or dissemination of research results.  

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