REINFORCE (REsearch INfrastructures FOR Citizens in Europe) is a Research & Innovation Action, supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SWAFS “Science with and for Society” work programme. Its main focus is citizen’s science: the participation of non-experts in scientific research, under the direction of professional scientists.

Through REINFORCE more than 100,000 citizens are engaged in the research done in Large Research Infrastructures, through a participatory design methodology that takes into account the special characteristics of different target groups, their barriers and constraints, their perceptions and biases and their attitudes and knowledge regarding science.

REINFORCE works to achieve the following goals:

1. Engaging citizens to contribute to online frontier science
2. Creating an active community of citizens who actively participate in scientific endeavours
3. Introducing responsible R&I in frontier Citizen Science landscape
4. Assessing the impact of frontier citizen science in science and society
5. Creating a policy roadmap for other large RI willing to implement citizen science projects
6. Exploring the potential of frontier citizen science for inclusion and diversity

The key instruments that the project uses to bring frontier science and society together are the Large Scale Citizen Science demonstrators. These are software tools developed by Large Research Infrastructures on top of the infrastructures provided by the Zooniverse citizen science platform. Through the demonstrators, which are in constant development thanks to users’ feedback, citizens are engaged in authentic research experiences, being asked for support in exploring uncharted scientific territories. They are also provided with cut tailored educational resources and training material, and with open data that they may be able to use in order to inquire further with the guidance of the consortium experts.

The currently available demonstrators are four:

• Gravitational Wave noise hunting
• Deep Sea Hunters
• Search for New Particles at the LHC
• Cosmic Muons Images

Duration: 2019 – 2022
EGO role: coordinator
Grant agreement code: REINFORCE-872859