In the European project “RIECS-Concept”, 13 partners, including OeAD, from eight countries are working together to develop a concept for a future research infrastructure for Citizen Science. The ideas and experiences of different user groups are highly relevant in this process.
Citizen Science is an open and inclusive research approach, which means that its services, platforms, and tools should be designed to be accessible to people outside of research institutions. One particularly important subgroup of Citizen Scientists in Austria is school students. Since 2015, more than 27,100 children, young people, and adults from across Austria have participated in 73 research projects through the Citizen Science Award. The majority of these participants were school classes ranging from primary to upper secondary level.
To incorporate the experience and expertise of young co-researchers into RIECS-Concept, the first student workshop was held on October 23. All participants had prior Citizen Science experience and had been actively involved in the Citizen Science Award 2025. They had contributed to projects addressing mathematical questions from everyday life, analysed languages in public spaces, and documented the presence of amphibians.
In the first part of the workshop, the students identified the challenges and successes that had shaped their research experiences. Despite technical and organisational difficulties, they reported being highly motivated to continue contributing to research even in their free time. Afterwards, participants developed ideas about which features and services a Citizen Science platform should offer to make participation easier and more accessible for themselves and other students in the future. These inputs feed directly into the international project work and, together with “user stories” from other workshops, form an important data basis for the infrastructure concepts.
From autumn 2025 to spring 2026, a wide range of participatory activities will take place in the project countries Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Serbia, and Switzerland to gather expertise and experiences from researchers and Citizen Scientists alike. In October, a workshop with adult citizen scientists (follow-up report) and a themed café at the OIS zam: Forum (follow-up report) were also held in Austria, where ideas for RIECS and a future infrastructure were developed.
The workshop at the Young Science Congress demonstrated that young co-researchers can also make valuable contributions and represent an important voice for the needs of the next generation of Citizen Scientists.
