The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Domestic Policy Council invited Department of Geography professor Waleed Abdalati to deliver a keynote at a citizen science forum, “Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, For the People, By the People”, on Wednesday, September 30, 2015. The forum is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC on the White House complex.
In the 2013 Second Open Government National Action Plan, President Obama called on agencies to harness the ingenuity of the public by accelerating and scaling the use of open innovation methods such as citizen science and crowdsourcing. Through this Plan, the Administration committed to expand its use of crowdsourcing and citizen science programs to further engage the public in problem solving and, as part of the 2015 White House Science Fair, made a commitment to hold a Citizen Science Forum.
This forum will bring together citizen science professionals, researchers, and stakeholders from local, state, Federal, and Tribal governments; academia; non-profits; and the private sector to celebrate the contributions of crowdsourcing and citizen science to enhancing agencies’ missions, and scientific and societal outcomes. It will also enable cross-sector discussions to spur bigger, better, and bolder citizen science and crowdsourcing utilization across a number of important challenges facing the Nation, such as the preservation of pollinators, monitoring drought conditions, recovering from coastal flooding, and low cost instrumentation for health.