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The European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) is an institutional bridge for practitioners and researchers of citizen science in Europe. ECSA was founded in 2014 in Germany and is ruled as charitable and member-based professional organization.

History
Citizen science has seen a remarkable evolution, with Europe being a global hotspot for it in the 21st century. . The idea of an intitutional framework to cultivate an exchange of knowledge and tools with other initiatives and stakeholders extended beyond the field of environmental monitoring and towards the whole of Europe, dates back to 2012. The impetus for this came from the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) project in the Great Britain.

ECSA was officially launched during the European Union Green Week in 2013, and was formally registered under German law as a charity organization in April 2014. ECSA's headquarters is currently hosted at the Museum for Natural History Berlin (in German: Museum für Naturkunde).

ECSA has a board of directors, elected by its members, and a collection of professional working groups that establish standards, identify best practices, help to focus research and technology, and explore the ethics of citizen science. In addition, it has an advisory board and a steering committee, which support the executive board in a range of important decisions, including the development of a strategic plan.

Vision and mission
At the heart of ECSA’s work is its role as a platform to support the exchange of ideas and experiences around citizen science among practitioners and other interested parties. Other roles include capacity building, promotion and evaluation for citizen science projects. ECSA fosters a vibrant citizen science community across Europe and works closely with its partner organizations, the Citizen Science Association (CSA) in the USA and the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA). ECSA’s overall mission is to promote sustainable development through citizen science, based on the idea that development is closely linked to research, innovation and empowerment. . Citizen science contributes to policy implementation, for example in the areas of environmental monitoring and open science.

Activities
Since its foundation, ECSA has successively developed its community and organization. It has held general assemblies each year since 2014, at which ECSA members and working groups present their projects and initiatives, and discuss how the organization’s vision can be further developed. Past ideas discussed have included the relationship to concepts such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and the idea for decentralized thematic hubs as engines for activity.

The first biannual international ECSA conference was held in May 2016 in Berlin, with more than 300 attendees. The international citizen science community addressed the ways in which participatory research generates innovations for science, society and policy. The second international ECSA conference was held in June 2018 in Geneva, where the emphasis was on the role of citizen science for grassroots organizations, for empowering individual citizens and increasing scientific literacy. The next international conference will be held in Trieste in May 2020.

ECSA has initiated several strategic capacity-building programmes at the European and national scale, which have led to the development of outputs such as the Socientize Green and White Papers on Citizen Science in Europe and the Greenpaper Citizen Science Strategy 2020 for Germany. The European White Paper provided the basis for several actions and policies related to public engagement in science directed by the European Commission, such as the Science with and for Society programme 2018–2020.

To complement the definition of citizen science, ECSA also developed Ten Principles of Citizen Science, which have been translated into numerous European languages and have been published as a chapter in the open access book Citizen Science - Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy.

ECSA is an active consortium member in several projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020. These include:
 * Doing-it-Together Science (DITOs)
 * LandSense - Urban Landscape Dynamics
 * WeObserve - An Ecosystem of Citizen Observatories for Environmental Monitoring
 * Panelfit - Participatory Approaches to a New Ethical and Legal Framework for ICT
 * EU-Citizen.Science - Sharing, Initiating, and Learning Citizen Science in Europe
 * Distributed Network for Odour Sensing, Empowerment and Sustainability (D-NOSES)

Partnerships
To promote and advance citizen science in Europe and beyond, ECSA engages in partnerships with sister organizations from other continents, as well as institutions and projects with agendas linked to citizen science. Currently, it has the following formal cooperation agreements:


 * A Memorandum of Understanding between the Citizen Science Association (CSA), and the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), ECSA and the formative communities and associations in Southeast Asia and Africa, to promote the value and impact of citizen science and cooperate in three specific areas:
 * 1) The international journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice
 * 2) International Citizen Science conferences
 * 3) Web-based services and resources
 * A Memorandum of Understanding with the RRI Tools project, to promote public engagement in science and to strengthen RRI in Europe, both on a conceptual and an implementation level.
 * A Memorandum of Understanding with the European Universities Public Relations and Information Officers Association (EUPRIO), to promote science communication and public engagement in science and to strengthen RRI in Europe, both on a conceptual and an implementation level, and with special emphasis on citizen science.
 * A Memorandum of Understanding with the EUBON project, to engage and work with members of the EU BON consortium towards the project goals, and to participate in and contribute to the network.