Guidelines on Competencies for Digital Inclusion

The CitiMeasure Guidelines on Competencies for Digital Inclusion aim to advance the understanding of the issue of 'competencies' for inclusion in increasingly digitised citizen science initiatives. One of the main contributions of these guidelines is unpacking the issue of competencies by identifying skills, knowledge, and attitudes that may be required for the inclusion of citizens in citizen science initiatives and those needed by project initiators to establish and run such initiatives. The current guidelines also provide recommendations on how to systematically think about and enhance these actors' competencies.  

These guidelines are not a comprehensive inventory of all possible categories of skills, knowledge, and attitudes for inclusion in citizen science. Moreover, the absence of certain skills, knowledge, or attitudes identified in these guidelines should not be considered as a reason for exclusion or discouragement of interested stakeholders from participation. We hope this is an informative resource for cities, the citizen science community, and those who are interested in the broader topics of competencies for public participation and stakeholder engagement.  

These guidelines result from a co-creation process led by Eurocities in close collaboration with the CitiMeasure Digital Inclusion working group members. The co-creation process included a joint effort to identify and share relevant resources and experiences and collaborative analysis, synthesis, and sense-making of the identified resources. As such, these guidelines reflect the collective understanding and experiences of 24 CitiMeasure working group members from seven European cities and nine organisations with interest and expertise in the topic.