Prototyping Citizen Science for Shared Understanding with Kat Kavanagh
This Wet Wednesday Webinar explores the power of citizen science and what changes when collaboration is treated as infrastructure rather than aspiration.
Many people working in citizen science already believe in its value... yet still feel frustrated by fragmented efforts, slow progress, and data that struggles to connect across projects, organisations, and, ultimately, the decisions and actions needed to improve river health.
This talk starts from a simple observation: collaboration is widely valued, but rarely designed. When systems aren’t built to help people share, interpret, and learn together, even the best intentions struggle to translate into impact.
Drawing on a design and technology background, Kat Kavanagh shares how Water Rangers has, over the past decade, used prototyping and iteration to design tools and open data systems that builds capacity and shared understanding for tens of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of organisations and groups.
Using examples from the Water Rangers data platform and the CaSTCo (Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative), the talk explores what changes when collaboration is treated as infrastructure rather than aspiration and how this approach can help integrate community monitoring, improve the use of evidence, and move citizen science beyond isolated pilots.
You’ll leave with practical frames and tools you can adapt in your own work, whether you’re running monitoring programmes, managing data, or trying to connect community evidence to real-world action, and a clearer sense of how small design choices can unlock much bigger collective progress.
Water Rangers 2025 Review: https://waterrangers.com/2025-review/
CaSTCo: https://castco.org/
Wet Wednesday Webinars are brought to you by the Downs to the Sea project, funded by The National Heritage Lottery Fund. Thank you Lottery Players!
