CCC Workshop Report Charts Future of Computational Citizen Science

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) convened a visioning workshop on April 8-9, 2025, in Washington, D.C., bringing together multidisciplinary experts to chart a path for the convergence of computational and citizen science. The resulting report, now published on arXiv, outlines a research agenda for how humans and machines can team up to tackle the world's most pressing scientific challenges. Citizen science already delivers measurable economic value—millions of dollars in volunteer labor—while extending government agency capacity in areas like disaster management, public health, water resources, energy, and workforce development.

The workshop report emphasizes that 21st-century scientific infrastructure requirements for citizen science mirror those for computational science more broadly. The distributed, collaborative, long-term, and contextual nature of citizen science makes it a demanding real-world testbed for robust research infrastructure that accounts for security, privacy, resource adaptability, and transparency. Key findings from the workshop point to future research directions including human-AI collaboration frameworks, scalable cyberinfrastructure, and ethical data governance. The report concludes with actionable recommendations for funding agencies, researchers, and policymakers to accelerate this convergence.