Towards more User-Centered Contributory Citizen Science Initiatives: Learning from the u3Green Approach

In many citizen science projects the use of geospatial technologies plays an important role. This refers in particular to initiatives where the public contributes spatial data. Along with the benefits, such initiatives also face challenges related to the quantity and quality of data provided. A suitable means of overcoming these problems are user-centered applications. However, since developers often lack a sufficient understanding of the requirements of users from the public, their appropriate involvement in application development is crucial. Despite existing approaches, there is still a need to further improve user involvement in these processes to deliver (more) user-centric applications. This paper contributes to this by presenting experiences from the u3Green project. The aim of u3Green is to develop an application tailored for young people to contribute spatial data about urban green that support the implementation of child- and youth-friendly cities. To generate a youth-centered application, a project-specific development process was created, which combines strong participatory design with the prototyping model and selected methods to involve young people in all development tasks. Collaborating with young people in this way confirmed several well-known aspects of designing user-centered data contribution solutions but also revealed new, previously unknown criteria for the implementation of user-centered applications.