Gaston Remmers

Candidate for the Board of Directors

“I am happy to candidate for membership of the Board of Directors of ECSA. Ever since I became an ECSA member since the 2018 Geneva conference, I have admired ECSA’s effectiveness in gearing administrative, academic and policy attention towards CS, and I would like to further strengthen the relevance of CS across the world.

I see three areas where I could be of added value. First, civic organizations are very much valued within ECSA yet less well represented, especially the smaller ones, of which there are many. I do represent one of these smaller civic NGO’s, our needs and perspectives are a little different, and I’d like to make their input resonate. Second, I am worried about the political implications of the interplay between a low societal trust in science, and a low trust of policymakers in the epistemic capacities of citizens. This dynamic has been smouldering for some years, and exacerbated in the covid pandemic. I believe I have the capacities for discourse and network to go beyond potentially devastating ruptures. This leads me to my third motivation, with a blink to Shannon Dosemagen’s keynote at the recent Vienna conference on the unprecedented challenges we are facing. Next to developing technical, educational and other infrastructures for Citizen Science, we need to build a culture that is able to endure uncertainty and that remains open to the unexpected, cognitively ánd emotionally. This demands something from us as humans, and of ECSA. I believe my personal experience with upheavals of all kinds has provided me with the insights and capacities to stay present in challenging times, and contribute to that culture.

I have experience with Citizen Science in multiple domains, such as agroecology, rural development and health. I am currently director of foundation My Data Our Health, a patient-driven NGO organizing and accelerating CS for Health and ethical data governance. In that position I was one of the drivers behind the ECSA Working Group Citizen Science for Health, which I served as chair during its first two years, and which has just produced the first ECSA conference on CS for Health in 2023. More details in my CV.”