What would a toolkit look like for communities to apply citizen science to address their own challenges?

The 4th question of the week is about enabling communities to tackle challenges via a toolkit type approach:

What could a co-creation toolkit look like that can be used with communities to design and use CitSocSci approach to address their own challenges?

In our exploration to date, it’s clear that some of the most compelling and useful applications for citizen social science are driven by a community wanting to tackle their own problems – often in the face of some immediate threat/challenge.

In fact community engagement and development are two of the big potential benefits of this type of problem solving approach (and indeed challenges in terms of identifying issues/challenges that folks feel motivated to become active participants in addressing).

We’ve already had ideas submitted that relate to flood sensor networks that citizens create within their community, air pollution sensors that are installed and managed by folks who care about that in their area and have seen in the just the last few days a fascinating citizen science response to finding the missing Air Malyasia airline over the South China seas

Riotcleanup emerged in response to the London riots a couple of years back, and Floodhack emerged from the recent flooding in the UK – community responses, using citizen engagement as a key technique.

By taking control of the process – rather than waiting for an institutional response – folks are realising very quickly that the public in their community (and beyond) will engage around specific, targeted challenges they can help with.

It does make us wonder what a freely available toolkit that could enable communities to apply this approach might include?