Citizen Science ambition

Perhaps the deepest hope behind Followly is to help cultivate and sustain a community of citizens grounded in a new (and perhaps very ancient, no?) attunement to the living world. Beyond the films we make, the encounters we organise or the traces we learn to read, this may be the project’s beating heart.

Tracking as the roots of politics.

People walk together, notice different things, compare perceptions, disagree, listen, return to the signs, change their minds. Around a track, knowledge is often something negotiated collectively rather than possessed individually. Some authors have traced politics very far back, to the moment when hunter-gatherers sat to listen to one another’s stories, observations and strategies. Whether or not we want to take that literally, we like the idea. There is something profoundly political in learning to pay attention together. And this capacity may be vital for what comes next.

One way of putting this into practice is to participate in the production, circulation and discussion of knowledge. Today, this is called citizen science.

Doubt as a productive discipline.

Followly approaches citizen science from a particular angle. Our focus is not only in the production of answers, but in what happens before an answer becomes possible.

Tracking is a particularly fertile practice for this. A trace is incomplete by nature. It is the remaining sign of an encounter we usually did not witness. Understanding it means bringing together shape, movement, substrate, weather, landscape, time, behaviour and countless contextual clues while constantly distinguishing what we observe from what we infer. This is why doubt matters to us.

Our online Track & Sign Challenge experiments with this very simple idea. Instead of asking participants to identify a trace, we ask them to contribute questions. Beginners, experienced trackers, naturalists and curious observers can all take part. One person may notice morphology, another movement, another weather, another something nobody had thought relevant before. Each map resulting from our community challenges preserves the particular paths taken by a collective investigation. Its convergences, detours, blind spots and unexpected connections.

In this sense, Followly seeks to contribute to citizen science slightly upstream of data collection. Before asking citizens to help produce more knowledge about the living world, we want to explore how we can become better at questioning what we think we know about it. This does not mean that every question, observation or interpretation has the same scientific value. But it gives different forms of knowledge somewhere to meet: scientific expertise, field experience, local knowledge, embodied perception, intuition, different cultural references and different cognitive styles. They do not need to become the same thing.

Hope & Perspectivism.

We do not all perceive, question or make sense of the world in the same way. Human beings are already remarkably neurodiverse. Different minds attend to different signals, organise information differently, follow different paths through uncertainty and sometimes inhabit strikingly different perceptual worlds. And if such diversity already exists within a single species, it opens onto a much greater vertigo: what might a world be like for an earthworm, a coral, a bat? We cannot simply step into these other worlds, nor should we pretend that we can. But we can learn from the limits of our own perspective.

Each body, each sensory apparatus, each form of life makes certain relations possible, certain signals meaningful, certain aspects of reality perceptible, while leaving others beyond reach. Tracking offers a modest way of approaching this multiplicity. A trace confronts us with another being without giving us direct access to its experience. We encounter what remains of a story, a movement, a passage through a place. To follow it is to try to understand another trajectory while knowing that our understanding will always be partial. This is why doubt matters to Followly, as a form of hospitality towards what our own way of perceiving may have left out.

Our place in the citizen science ecosystem.

Followly does not aim to replace biodiversity databases, identification platforms or established citizen science programmes. We would like to work at a slightly different moment in the process. For Followly, citizen science begins slightly upstream of data collection: in how we learn to observe, question, and collectively build knowledge before reaching conclusions. Tracking provides particularly fertile ground for this. That is why we place doubt at the heart of our approach inspired by tracking. Doubt as a discipline: suspending judgement, identifying what is missing, confronting different perceptions, entertaining multiple hypotheses, and remaining able to revise what we thought we knew.

The ECSA even encourages initiatives to define what citizen science means within their own project, rather than trying to fit into a fixed definition. Our approach to citizen science rests on a few simple principles: suspension of judgement, distinction between observation and inference, attention to missing information, plurality of questions, collective scrutiny, revisability, and documentation of the process of inquiry.