Introducing the Ethics Working Group
The purpose of the CSA Working Group on Ethics is to explore and address a range of ethical concerns for which people (members of the public and practitioners) may be unprotected when public participants are involved as contributors and collaborators in various configurations of citizen science. The nuanced and complex relationships among practitioners, individual participants, and communities can lead to ethical issues not yet fully addressed by current best practices for research with human subjects. While there are ethical codes and reasoning in fields such as ethnobotany, informatics, community health, and geography, these are great starting points (not end points)…