Ibercivis Foundation

IBERCIVIS is the national private non-for-profit foundation devoted to citizen science in Spain. IBERCIVIS
board is formed by the Ministry of Innovation and Competitiveness of Spain, the regional Government of
Aragon, CSIC, CIEMAT, University of Zaragoza and the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation.
IBERCIVIS was legally established in 2012 but the consortium has been working closely since 2007 both in
Spain and Portugal (see www.ibercivis.pt). Since then, we have deployed more than 60 experiments from 40
different research groups reaching over 60.000 citizen scientists. Ours set of experiments and include volunteer computing (e.g. simulation of nuclear fusion devices yielding on average 8 million hours and 2.3
TFLOPS), volunteer sensing (e.g. odour nuisances reports: OdourCollect), participatory experiments (e.g.
human behaviour in dilemma), or collective intelligence projects (e.g. collective music composition) among
others. We support groups with hardware (e.g. hosting, load balance, security services), middleware (e.g.
tech eulogies such as BOINC, PyBossa, EpiCollect) and software development (e.g. multi device
developments or libraries such as gromacs or autodock). Despite ICT and virtual experiments are our focus,
due to the digitally enabled borderless transformation of research, reaching new scales of number and range
of contributors, we also work offline with expanded laboratories open to the public such as fablabs or wet
labs.
We deploy, support and promote the general public engagement in science with research and educational
purposes. We play a central role in the Citizen Science Community at local, national and international levels.
We are the national institution of Spain promoting citizen science and we run the portal Observatory of
Citizen Science in Spain (www.ciencia-ciudadana.es) We are part of the steering committee of the European
Citizen Science Association, linking it with responsible research and innovation, working on the adaptation
of the RRI-Tools self reflection tool for the CitSci communities and #CitSciChatES among other actives.
Since 2012 we coordinate the European project Socientize (www.socientize.eu) which delivered the White
Paper on Citizen Science for Europe, referenced as a flagship document for the citizen science policy
making. IBERCIVIS and Socientize have been referenced as best practices by several institutions and
initiatives, highlighting the European Commission, the Australian Citizen Science Association, RRI-Tools,
RRI-ICT, Ars Electronica or Cotec Foundation among others. IBERCIVIS has been marked as good practice
in several scenarios, including open governance and grass-roots initiatives. We set up the interaction between
science and society for scientific policy making in Socientize. In addition to create the inclusive scenarios for
citizen-lead projects, we support social innovation by providing scientific resources and equipment for
citizen involvement in scientific research. Ibercivis has experience in developing participatory applications
as well as applications using the Copernicus Framework. We have develop mobile application in fire risk
management for the Joint Research Center under the EOVALUE program.