Digital Tools for Citizen Science

Below is a curated list of awesome software and other resources to enable those who want to use scientific tools to empower communities and/or practice various forms of non-institutional science. It is largely inspired by this repository listing digital tools for activists. Feel free to share suggestions. If you add software to the list, free and open-source software is strongly encouraged over proprietary software.

Contents

• Software
• Educational
• Tools and Equipment
• Publishing and Doing Research
• Citizen Science Spaces and Projects
• Art and Science Spaces
• Literature
• Funding and Support
• Conferences and Events
• Other Resources
• Questions and Knowledge Gaps
• How to contribute to this list
• License

Software

Lab Equipment Software

• Grafana - Create a dashboard (online if you wish) that visualizes your experimental data.
• mMass - Open-source software for mass spectrometers.
• Stellarium - Open-source planetarium software.

Modeling and Computation

• OpenSCAD - 3D modeling software.
• SageMath - Open-source cloud-based computation (similar to MATLAB and Mathematica).
• GNU Octave - Free software numerical computation program, similar to MATLAB.
• Dia - Open-source software for making diagrams.
• Gephi - Open graph visualization platform.
• QGIS - Open GIS software.
• Mineways - a tool for turning Minecraft model files into 3D-printable .stl files
• ALOHA - A piece of software disributed by the EPA that models the threat zone for various types of chemical spill and explosion hazards.
• vegan - R package for statistical work in community ecology.
• BOINC - Open-source cross-platform volunteer computing network connecting computers of volunteers/citizen scientists to scientific research projects. Used by CERN and universities around the world.
• YData Profiling - A general-purpose open-source data profiler for high-level analysis of a dataset.
• Desbordante - An open-source data profiler specifically focused on discovery and validation of complex patterns in data.

Publishing , Collaboration and Organization

• Zotero - Open-source citation management software.
• TiddlyWiki - Easily create your own wikis to organize information.
• Evergreen ILS - Software for managing a library of books (and the loaning process).
• ISLE - Open-source laboratory equipment inventory management system developed by NASA.
• GanttProject - Productivity tool for scheduling tasks and making Gantt charts.
• Open Science Framework - Open-source collaborative project manager for scientific research.
• Calibre - eBook management software.
• LibraryThing - an online platform for organizing your library.
• PECE - The Platform for Experimental and Collaborative Ethnography. This project provides an online platform for academic collaboration that helps keep track of complex attribution of credit. It is geared toward anthropologists but is expanding to become more broad.
• RapidPro - An open-source platform for building scalable applications that users can interact with via SMS.
• eu-citizen.science - links to 200 projects
• Zooniverse - website for zoo & universe projects

### Graphs and Visualization * GraphViz - tool for creating scientific graphs

Educational

• Light and Matter - Benjamin Crowell's free-to-download, cheap-to-buy open source physics textbooks.
• OpenStax - Repository of open-licensed and collaboratively-edited textbooks on many basic subjects. You can download them as ebooks or order print copies.