The goal
Support and promote citizen science in Social Science and Humanities (SSH) disciplines, creating a digital ecosystem where researchers, professionals and civil society stakeholders can meet, co-design and develop participatory research projects. Overcome the fragmentation of existing platforms by offering integrated tools for matchmaking, collaborative project management, cooperation analysis and funding search.
Our response
VERA is a collaborative platform that allows users to create individual profiles, find collaborators through matchmaking systems and manage projects with task lists, public or private diaries and integrated Mattermost chat. Analytics tools enable monitoring of cooperation dynamics within teams, while integration with EU-Citizen.Science, GoTRIPLE and FundIt increases the visibility of projects, facilitates the discovery of related research and supports the identification of funding opportunities.
Iterative co-design with the SSH citizen science community
The project was developed with a user-centred and co-design approach, actively involving the SSH community through user research activities, participatory workshops and iterative user testing phases. The user experience is designed for interdisciplinary and collaborative teams, with detailed profiles, dedicated project spaces and tools for collaboration and activity documentation.
Open source architecture and interoperability by design
VERA is a cloud-based open source platform, designed to be scalable and interoperable. The architecture integrates collaborative tools, analytics systems for monitoring cooperation dynamics and APIs for interoperability with other platforms in the OPERAS ecosystem. Developed iteratively, the platform was progressively released up to the public version, with a long-term vision as a central service for participatory research in Europe.
The platform is designed to make collaboration between different users feel natural and straightforward: every project becomes a shared space where ideas, tools and results can be co-designed, discussed and documented. VERA thus turns participatory research into a concrete, accessible experience that is easily replicable by other teams.
