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 a research project to the contributions of non-professional actors (amateurs, students or sometimes even experts without a formal job-title) in the so called "open/citizen science". Previous studies have shown as also non-professional actors have the potential to provide a valuable contribution also to complex research projects if the environment in which they are engaged is carefully designed. Theoretical frameworks and operative guidelines for developing public engagement activities for citizen science are still evolving and are not exhaustively defined. While designing the public engagement activities for a robotics research project, HeritageBot (HB), we looked for empirical guidelines and theoretical framework that could support our work. The lack of a structured and comprehensive answer to our research needs has been the initial trigger for this article. This paper explores the process of developing collaborative initiatives involving external non-professional actors in a set of HB's scientific research tasks through a set of public engagement activities. First, we will explore the theoretical framework and the selected methodologies for designing citizen-science strategies. Second, we will describe, through empirical episodes, the action research approach that we followed to develop HB's public engagement strategy. Finally, we will introduce the progresses in defining an experimental methodology, instrumental to the validation of the defined strategy.