Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards $500,000 grant to Commons Lab to promote citizen science | EurekAlert! Science News

"The Commons Lab of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has received a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to continue its work on citizen science, particularly by supporting standardized data and metadata collection and encouraging the use of citizen science by federal agencies. The Commons Lab seeks to mobilize public participation in science, technology and policy through innovative tools like citizen science and crowdsourcing. The Sloan Foundation grant will allow the Commons Lab to work with partner organizations like SciStarter and CitSci.org to help citizen science projects collect and share standardized information by building a database of citizen science tools and developing a platform to help support observational data sharing. This grant also supports a new partnership between the Commons Lab and the General Services Administration to maintain and build upon crucial support for citizen science expressed by the Obama administration, including the September 2015 memorandum from Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The memo outlined principles and next steps to encourage the use of citizen science and crowdsourcing by federal agencies ..."