On 10 and 11 September 2026, the Citizen Science Summit: Designing the Future of Citizen Science Infrastructure, organised by the Horizon Europe project RIECS Concept, brought together researchers, policymakers, civil society representatives, technology providers, practitioners and other stakeholders at the JKU MED Campus in Linz. Embedded in the Ars Electronica Festival, the Summit marked the transition from the first to the second phase of RIECS-Concept, the European initiative working towards a dedicated Research Infrastructure for Citizen Science.
Rather than being organised as a conventional conference, the Summit served as a collaborative working space. Around 20 external experts, including citizen scientists, joined project partners to discuss needs, priorities and concrete next steps for an infrastructure that can be supported and used by the wider Citizen Science community. As part of the Summit, Barbara Kieslinger and Stefanie Schürz from the Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) facilitated a workshop on the impact assessment of Research Infrastructure for Citizen Science. The workshop invited participants to critically review a proposed framework of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and discuss which indicators they considered particularly important, which were less useful, and which dimensions were still missing.
What does meaningful impact look like?
Working in small groups, participants identified their “tops”, “flops” and “wild cards” among the proposed indicators. The exercise produced a diverse set of perspectives and revealed important questions about how the future research infrastructure should understand and assess its own impact.
Several themes emerged strongly across the discussions. Participants emphasised accessibility, citizen-generated data, community stewardship and empowerment, policy uptake, citizen interfaces and the quality of data and validation processes. One group, for example, highlighted the importance of policy support, co-developed outputs and citizen interfaces, while proposing “local adaptation” as an additional dimension to capture how local initiatives can adapt an infrastructure to their own cultural, institutional and policy contexts.
Another group placed accessibility, citizen-generated data and community ownership among its priorities. Importantly, participants argued that assessing citizen-generated data should not only concern conventional notions of data quality, but also the quality of the wider process through which citizens’ contributions enter and become part of the research system.
At the same time, some conventional research indicators proved more controversial. Scientific publications, tools and narrowly framed SDG contributions were questioned as measures of impact for an infrastructure intended to extend beyond traditional academic research. Participants also stressed that apparently less important indicators were not necessarily irrelevant; rather, their usefulness depended on how they were formulated and what aspect of the infrastructure they were intended to assess.
Indicators depend on who is asking
A recurring question throughout the workshop was: Who will use the KPIs, and for what purpose? Participants pointed out that the perceived importance of an indicator changes depending on whether assessment is intended for researchers, citizens, policymakers, funders or external evaluators. The discussions consequently went beyond selecting individual indicators to question how the overall impact framework should be structured and for whom.
This was particularly evident in discussions about participation and inclusion. Participants cautioned against indicators becoming a simple “checkbox exercise”. Diversity, representation or contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals, for example, need to capture meaningful changes rather than merely record whether particular categories have formally been addressed.
The workshop also demonstrated that indicators cannot necessarily be considered in isolation. Participants highlighted relationships and potential tensions between different KPIs, for example, between co-developed services, usability and citizen-generated data, suggesting that impact assessment should also examine how different dimensions of the infrastructure reinforce or constrain one another.
The results of the workshop provide valuable input for refining the RIECS impact assessment framework as the project moves into its next phase. They also point to a broader challenge: assessing a participatory research infrastructure requires measures that go beyond conventional scientific outputs and recognise accessibility, community ownership, local adaptation, meaningful participation and policy relevance as important dimensions of impact.
