By Agi Gedeon, ACSA-WA Chair
The WA Chapter of the Australian Citizen Science Association was officially launched in February 2018 at the Australian Citizen Science Conference, #CitSciOz18.
We had our first ACSA-WA public event on Saturday 12th May and invited citizen science practitioners, volunteers, scientists and end-users to meet and mingle to learn about many active and successful projects. It was a perfect sunny day in King’s Park and there was a good number attending. A few new faces as well. We heard about a number of interesting projects including an astronomy project to be launched by ICRAR, also a bit about DolphinWatch and fungi walks and a PhD project on red-tailed black cockatoos, another on non-insect pollinators and Birdlife Australia.
We celebrated with Microblitz which, after several months of planning, had re-launched new MicroBlitz apps and website the day before. We heard that Professor Andy Whiteley, the MicroBlitz Project Director chatted with Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall broadcast in real time to a few hundred School of Isolated & Distance Education (SIDE) students who tuned in to a very special science lesson.
All in all it was a most successful get-together and lots of people stayed on to exchange business cards, stories and experiences which is always a good sign of some excellent networking going on.
You can follow ACSA-WA on our Facebook page.