On the 16th of April, researchers and scientific communicators gathered for the 2nd Barcelona Citizen Science Day in order to discuss citizen science projects carried out in Barcelona. Annick Labeeuw, the ‘Saca la Lengua’ project manager of the CRG, participated in the meeting presenting our flagship project on citizen science: Saca La lengua.

The Barcelona Citizen Science Day is an open forum on citizen science for the city of Barcelona to discuss common ideas, existing and new projects. This meeting covers a wide range of research from environmental sciences, conservation and ecology, to neurobiology and biomedicine.

Annick Labeeuw presented the Saca La Lengua project in one of the Ignite Talks programmed. This project is the first citizen science initiative undertaken by the CRG, which aims to improve the understanding of the oral microbiome. Society participates in this project at different levels; from inception; sending proposals for the initial hypothesis to actively taking samples and performing analysis and interpreting the data. Since the projects initiation 7 months ago, Annick focused her talk on presenting some positive side effects and changes that have been made on an organizational level as well as the challenges we have overcome to make this project possible.

Closing the meeting a public keynote conference was given by Liz Barry, Co-founder and Director of Community Development at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). She presented her project Public Lab, which is focused on large-scale community environmental monitoring and inventing news techniques and equipment to support this.

The 2nd Barcelona Citizen Science Day is included into the Novum 2015 festival; the Barcelona Science, Technology and Innovation Festival that is being held in Barcelona from 14th to 30th of April. The CRG will also participate performing several activities and practical workshops in “La Festa”, an open science campus in Les Glòries during the 25th and 26 of April. Hope to see you there! 

This project has received funding mainly from 'la Caixa' Foundation and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, ‘Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013-2017’, SEV-2012-0208.