Members of the working group
The MLE Citizen Science working group meeting was held in Hungary between 11-13 September 2022, hosted by the NRDI Office and co-organised by the University of Pannonia and Eötvös Loránd University.
Citizen Science?
The National Position Paper on Open Science sees local and regional Citizen Science projects initiated by researchers as a special opportunity to support open science and to support the realisation of such objectives. Involving citizens in research can also play an important role in the third mission of higher education institutions. There are already national and international collaborative projects that have proven the viability of the public participation model. The success of Citizen Science projects requires a stable and predictable long-term financing and wide-open access dissemination of research results. In line with this, active Hungarian participation in the working group is a key priority in the Office’s strategy.
The first day of the event was organised by the University of Pannonia in Veszprém. In the first half of the workshop, Professor András Gelencsér, Rector of the University, gave an interactive presentation on the climate change survey conducted by the Climate Change National Laboratory. After completing the quiz, the participants agreed that there is still a lot to learn about climate change, which is becoming more and more visible in our daily lives. The second part of the meeting took place on Lake Balaton, where the members of the working group were introduced to the tick monitoring application developed at the Ecological Research Centre on a pleasure boat, during an interesting presentation by Gábor Földvári.
Family dog project
On the second day of the workshop, the ELTE Faculty of Natural Sciences (ELTE TTK) hosted participants in the Gömb Aula on the Lágymányos campus. After the welcome speech by Imre Kacskovics, Dean of the University, István Szabó, Vice President of the University, presented the funding ecosystem of Open Science and Citizen Science in Hungary. The members of the working group had the opportunity to learn about the ongoing Citizen Science projects coordinated by Professor Ádám Miklósi at ELTE. A prominent part of the programme was the family dog project led by Enikő Kubinyi, where owners and their dogs participated in a panel discussion to share their experiences of the challenges of working with scientists as ordinary people in such research.
The workshop included a poster exhibition presenting Citizen Science projects that have been or are being implemented in Hungarian universities and research institutions.
The poster exhibition was a great success, and the NRDI Office is organising a national travelling exhibition of the collected works. The aim is to bring the travelling exhibition to all interested universities or research institutions so that it can be viewed by the local research community, university citizens and those interested in Citizen Science.
The first venue of the travelling exhibition will be the University of Pannonia, University Library and Knowledge Centre, between 3-14 October 2022. On Monday 10 October, between 11:00 and 15:00, the university will organise a forum, which is expected to be attended by the researchers who produced the posters.
One of the most important results of the two-day MLE Citizen Science event was the creation of the first Hungarian Citizen Science open mailing list, which will in the future serve as a kind of professional forum to inform recipients about news, events and calls for proposals related to community science. The mailing list will also facilitate collaboration between researchers and research groups active in the field of community science and the development of new professional networks.
The mailing list is open, anyone can join.
Contact persons: Katalin Urbán (katalin.urban@nkfih.gov.hu)
Beatrix Borza (beatrix.borza@nkfih.gov.hu)
For information on the National Position Paper on Open Science, which discusses the concept of Citizen Science in a separate section, see the link below: National Position Paper on Open Science - Call to Join