What is: Citizen Social Science?

Citizen Science is a recent phrase to depict the way citizens can contribute to large-scale solutions by doing science in their back yard. We might think of people reporting certain types of birds or butterflies to add to local datasets that are used at research labs or contribute to national or international databases. Citizen social science is similar in that people in communities are conducting research, but the ‘data’ they generate is for themselves and their own local enclaves. Moodboarding seems a long way away from ‘data collection’, but both methods are just tools – tools to collect meaningful information that is useful for understanding society.