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Why do we use the term "community science"?

We use the term community science in the recognition that environmental change in the 21st Century United States requires both community organizing and scientific knowledge production.

When would you start a community science project?

You start a community science project when you have a concern with at least one aspect which can be understood by science (such as the leaking of an industrial chemical, or differences in air quality) but which is also a problem larger than science in the sense that the issues emanate from historical and ongoing injustices that compound along economic and racial lines. While every once in a while pollution turns out to be a simple issue with a straightforward answer leading to a course of action that is speedily taken by the powers that be, the vast majority of persistent pollution is generated by intractable, systemic, multi-owner problems that have fallen (or been pushed) through the gaps in environmental governance and require social and political action to address.

What happens in a community science project?

In a community science project, people with environmental health concerns write up what is known, what they suspect, and what they wish to know (see https://publiclab.org/issue-brief), then break out a series of more specific questions for deeper exploration (see https://publiclab.org/notes/renee/10-01-2021/creating-research-questions-for-your-community-science-project). We think of this as the start of problem identification and refinement, one of many possible phases in a community science project.

Phases in a community science project may include problem identification, problem refinement, research of many types including mapping, monitoring, sampling, hypothesis-driven scientific research, etc, plus organizing, mobilizing, political advocacy, design, and remediation. There are many reasons why these phases might change order, skip, or repeat. Please keep in mind that campaigns for change take years and stress requires solidarity. Consider that even the Western scientific tradition acknowledges:

The ideas that we have in research are only in part a logical product growing out of a careful weighing of evidence. We do not generally think problems through in a straight line. Often we have the experience of being immersed in a mass of confusing data. We study the data carefully, bringing all our powers of logical analysis to bear upon them. We come up with an idea or two. But still the data do not fall in any coherent pattern. Then we go on living with the data—and with the people—until perhaps some chance occurrence casts a totally different light upon the data, and we begin to see a pattern that we have not seen before. This pattern is not purely an artistic creation. Once we think we see it, we must reexamine our notes and perhaps set out to gather new data in order to determine whether the pattern adequately represents the life we are observing or is simply a product of our imagination. - William Foote Whyte (1955)

During a community science project, people learn about, compare, and challenge each other’s various ways of knowing and the resulting knowledge to see what is deserving of a closer, more scientific look and/or a deeper historical truth telling in order to gain the grounding needed to achieve locally held goals.

Outcomes

Outcomes of community science may include:

• Changes to the peer researchers themselves, because shared inquiry develops the social cohesion needed to see a social change process through
• A broadened base of who is concerned leading to increased political will and power
• Data useable by journalists, regulators, and courts
• The creation of new regulations, the enforcement of existing regulations, clean-ups, convictions, compensation, and other types of redress and remediation

Where did this term come from?

The term "community science" was first used in the 1980's and 1990's by environmental justice organizations Communities for a Better Environment and Global Community Monitor who were using low-cost monitoring equipment to document industrial emissions. Public Lab organized an event in 2014 with Global Community Monitor and Jackie James of Citizen Science Community Resources called "Community-based Science for Action." Public Lab traces the current growth in the "community science movement" including the explosion of usage in the term community science by institutions around the world to our joining forces with the existing environmental justice monitoring movement. To read this story in a longer format, see Dosemagen's piece "Exploring the Roots: the evolution of civic and community science," excerpted here:

Community science in its original intent linked grassroots organizing, socially situated data collection, and accessible technology. This was the model of Communities for a Better Environment, Global Community Monitor (now-defunct), and the many Bucket Brigades that arose from it. The actions of community science can date as far back as the 1980s and early 1990s with models deeply rooted in environmental justice organizing, but the term itself we started using around 2013. In November 2014, aligned with Public Lab’s annual community science convening (the “Barnraising”) and the American Public Health Association annual conference in New Orleans, Global Community Monitor, Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Public Lab co-hosted the first “Community-based Science for Action Convening.” At this event, we featured community science as a track, highlighted how low-cost tools were used in the work of health and justice organizing, and brought together people from around the country that were strategically thinking about applying science to questions of industrial oversight.

Additional lineage

Public Lab respectfully draws on multiple rich lineages of organizing with a site-specific focus for community self-determination. See https://publiclab.org/organizing for more.

This timeline sketch loosely mentions some moments in locally-led knowledge production and the technology required to support it, which together can support the pursuit of community self-determination and recovery from colonial, enslaving, industrial, and economic trauma to human-environment relationships:

• 1930s village technology for local self-sufficiency (Ghandi)
• 1940s and onward: action research as part of organizational development Kurt Lewin
• 1970s and onward: action research and popular education originating in Brasil and Colombia as well as India, the Philippines, South Africa and all over the world grew to include terms like participatory action research, community-based participatory research, participatory mapping, participatory learning and action. Also see walking tours. We distance ourselves from the patronizing approaches that international development economics built on the pre-existing village technology movement and rebranded as appropriate technology._
• 1980s and onward: popular epidemiology, community science
• 1990s and onward: street science, public participation in geographic information systems
• 2000s and onward: commons-based peer production, open hardware, civic tech. We distance ourselves from the crowdharvesting techniques of citizen science, and fight for inclusion in open source against -"isms" cloaked in meritocracy.
• 2010s and onward: "open" movement spreads to data, science, government, and more. Reboot of community science by Public Lab and a lot of other amazing networks and communities!
• 2020s and onward:

Historical

On a longer trajectory, community science can be understood as a practice of inquiry, or action research, described by Kurt Lewin in the 1940's as "a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action and fact finding about the results of the action" (Lewin, 1946/1948, p. 206). Lewin in turn was working in the pragmatic philosophical tradition established by John Dewey, in which knowledge is judged by its usefulness to human problems, and truth is socially shared and serves as the basis for what people hold in common (Dewey 1916). Dewey wrote about the patterns he observed in problem solving, which included a starting point of feeling that something was wrong, a clear rejection of the ol' Western split between emotion and reason. He also wrote that problems don't exist before the beginning of inquiry, emphasizing that the problem definition stage is an essential part of the research. Science and technology scholar John Law echoes this position in 2004, "research does not access a pre-existing reality but is active in the creation of reality."

Although western science has more recently established a tradition of participation from within its ranks known as "citizen science", professional science is the aberration in the historical record:

“Two centuries ago, almost all scientists made their living in some other profession. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was a printer, diplomat and politician; Charles Darwin (1809–1888) sailed on the Beagle as an unpaid companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy, not as a professional naturalist. The rise of science as a paid profession is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from the later part of the 19th century. However, citizen scientists have never disappeared, particularly in sciences such as archaeology, astronomy and natural history, where skill in observation can be more important than expensive equipment.” (Silvertown 2009 A New Dawn For Citizen Science) https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.03.017

More on early science, which partially illuminates why heavy boots feature in the Public Lab logo:

“Manual workers, tradesmen, and craftsmen, through a trial-and-error process, created the empirical basis for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century” —from A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks. The author, Clifford D. Connor in this interview, writes: "the empirical method, the experimental method, did not come from scholars but from the workshops of artisans"

Participation in science died off as the field professionalized, until the internet enabled — and neoliberal cuts to government budgets for scientific research forced — a return to participation in the 2000s, but as directed by scientific authorities. See Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, and this discussion by Gwen Ottinger, long-standing board member of the Public Lab nonprofit:

"Definitional work done by researchers in the scientific authority-driven tradition has come to shape the institutionalization of citizen science at the expense of social movement-based citizen scientists’ visions of social and scientific change." Ottinger 2017 "Reconstructing or Reproducing? PDF

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Components of Public Lab's model

• Organizing - local leadership
• Advocacy - campaign strategy
• Law & Policy - triggering enforcement

Why we need community science

To reduce harm caused by regulatory gaps: Hotspots can be invisible within areas of "attainment," to such a degree in certain cases that regulatory science becomes a barrier to equal access of a clean environment

To reduce harm caused by enforcement gaps: Powerful corporate "neighbors" can evade accountability

To reduce harm caused by gaps in government data: There is missing data at relevant scales about what matters

To reduce harm caused by the structurally unjust burden of proof: This injustice is heaped onto those experiencing environmental injustice

To support empirical observation:Transforming anecdote to data, enabling people to speak languages of power

To support environmental journalism: Coverage of complex issues with multiple stakeholders and types of knowledge

To support data-based decision-making at all levels:The smallest units of government aren't equipped to collect or incorporate epistemologically diverse types of data. Actually this is true for all levels of government, "They can dish it but can't take it"

To support community organizing: Because campaigns take years, and stress needs solidarity. For exchanging stories of the pursuit and achievement of justice.

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Our first attempt in print at defining Public Lab's model of community science was written up in 2015 by @/shannon and @/gretchengehrke: "…collaboratively-led scientific investigation and exploration to address community defined questions, allowing for engagement in the entirety of the scientific process. Unique in comparison to citizen science, community science may or may not include partnerships with professional scientists, emphasizes the community’s ownership of research and access to resulting data, and orients towards community goals and working together in scalable networks to encourage collaborative learning and civic engagement."

In a Public Lab and TEx worksession in summer 2019, a short list of shared concerns emerged:

• Form equitable partnerships
• Work in a transparent and accessible manner
• Focus on impact towards locally set goals