Our principles

Opening up science for all requires a collective effort and new ways of thinking. As a project team, we came up with the following principles to guide our activities.

“Bill and Ben the flowerpot men” by Jeremy Segrott is licensed under CC BY 2.0
OPENER Team at Salford kick-off meeting (by @DrHG)
“pluralism” by Votrobeck is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
“Met Office Climate Data – Month by Month (September)” by Jer Thorp  is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We believe that sustainable citizen science and public engagement with environmental research must:

  • be a multi-disciplinary and partnership-building endeavour;

  • actively build on existing expertise in citizen science and participatory engagement;

  • acknowledge people have a complex identities, often with contradictory opinions;

  • respect and value all knowledge as meaningful and promote pluralism in expertise;

  • develop increased capacity, interest and skills of researchers and audiences;

  • enable avenues of engagement that acknowledge different needs, interests and availability;

  • facilitate public involvement in all stages of the scientific process and make explicit links to everyday life.

Over the next 12 months we’ll add your commitments to this too.

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