The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change-related citizen science web prototype (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The prototype will be a mobile-friendly website that allows citizens to take and submit photos and other “ground truth” observations to the Trusted Authorities, during /after floods. This information can be used to help the authorities assess and predict the flood or disaster scope and impact.

We are building a web application prototype that citizen scientists that will use to safely take and submit photos and other "ground truth" observations to the Trusted Authorities, during/after floods and other climate change-related natural disasters.

Citizen scientists will be taking images and uploading them to a website. We need to verify who they are and track their observation histories. So, we wish to carefully consider and balance trade-offs between the need to properly verify observations while protecting the privacy of the observers.

For instance, citizen scientists may wish to have themselves removed from the system at some point, and we must consider how to do that while retaining some data such as the observations they uploaded. We want to ensure our data ownership and data rights to submitted observations are clearly stated and understood before citizen scientists upload any observation data. Do we need to anonymize the observations, and if so what needs to be anonymized?

We would also like you to research and recommend on:

• What kind of volunteer agreements and terms may we need to enter into with citizen scientists?
• How does a citizen scientist request their account/data/history be removed?
• What is the process and considerations by which we remove a citizen scientist from the project?
• Research relevant Canadian and international laws and regulations related to privacy and data confidentiality
• Research existing citizen scientist projects for their privacy and personal data standards

Your Contribution

Use your skills and creativity in all aspects to research, identify, and recommend the policies, laws, and standards which might apply to the project, including any the privacy and personal data issues.

At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its use case, goals and objectives, and even detailed low-level fidelity wireframes. and other recommendations behind the proposed citizen science web application features.