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Citizens are increasingly crowdfunding IoT based participatory sensing technologies that allow them to collect and share data about the environment. These initiatives are usually referred to as grassroots and are driven by a vision of widening access to tools for political action. In this paper we compare patterns of participation and user experience over 15 months in two distinct communities using 'Smart Citizen', a crowdfunded IoT participatory sensing tool. Our studies reveal that technology issues and a lack of reliability of the sensed data hindered user participation. However, in one of the communities, many of these challenges were overcome through orchestrated actions led by community champions. We discuss how crowdfunding doesn't necessarily translate into active participation and provide guidelines on how to achieve sustained engagement in crowdfunded IoT community sensing projects: enable distributed orchestration provided by local champions, encourage social interactions that embed skills and learning, and facilitate meaningful participation and reward mechanisms among community members.

Citizen science is challenging professional researchers and their organizations to rethink the way they do science and connect with society. In any citizen science project, professional researchers are "making a promise" to the public about the level of participation and power in decision making that they are willing to provide to citizen scientists. Researchers should set expectations explicitly to ensure informed participation, trust, and motivation. Also, the design of tools for informed consent, information sharing, recognition, and privacy has to be adapted to the new power relations and distributed knowledge production. Based on fieldwork experiences and literature review about environmental and biomedical citizen science, this article examines the challenges and proposes solutions for: 1) setting expectations for informed participation; 2) addressing privacy concerns and adapting informed consent to evolving interests and networked environments; and 3) promoting citizen governance of research data. Citizen science has the potential to both increase scientific literacy and counteract mistrust and skepticism about scientific evidence of global problems (such as climate change) that need to be addressed. However, there are still many challenges to fulfilling the promise of citizen science-for example, empowering people and gaining trust. A few inspiring initiatives help us reflect on a facilitation model for engagement and informed participation; privacy by design; and new governance models for research data provided by citizen scientists.

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