The creation of a community to engage in innovation processes and citizen science

The use of scientific principles and methods by non-professional scientists, commonly referred to as citizen science, may be a promising way to improve public participation in research as well as public health. In contrast to forms of user involvement that are concentrated at particular moments of time, citizen science often requires a collaboration between a group of citizens and
professional researchers over an extended period of time, and accordingly, the formation of a community. In a set of citizen science projects on different health-related topics (diabetes, dementia, living independently in older age, loneliness) that were conducted as part of the Dutch TOPFIT Citizenlab we found that this process of community-building required a set of recurring elements: 1) recognizing and acknowledging each other’s capacities, 2) acknowledging
different goals, 3) building a relationship of trust, and 4) creating a learning environment. This chapter explores how these four processes played out throughout the different cases, and how they were perceived by the co-researchers.