Crowdsourced Monitoring, Citizen Empowerment and Data Credibility: The case of Observations.be

Crowdsourcing is today a revolutionary phenomenon changing pro- foundly our ways of communicating and producing. This article is interested in two issues that are crucial to its development and impacts. On one hand, it in- vestigates the forms and limits of crowdsourcing-related citizen empowerment. It is less concerned by the now recognized fact that crowdsourcing is empower- ing, but rather focuses on the ways it does so and the architecture of the rela- tions between citizens, scientists and institutions in this new context. On the other, it discusses the question of credibility of data produced through crowd- sourcing. This question represents, in fact, the Achilles’ heel that destabilizes the rise of citizen power in the face of experts and institutions. In its discussion of these two issues, the article relies on a particularly interesting case study: the online platform of participatory monitoring of biodiversity in Belgium Observa- tions.be. The creation of databases is an occasion here for reflexivity, learning and mobilisation. It is also an occasion for the liberation of the lay citizen, as an individual, from the straightjackets delimiting the institutional, scientific and associative spaces where he remains a subject, a collaborator or a member – al- ways in a subordinate position. He becomes a peer producer, partner and discussant. More important, learning and action networks that develop in the platform cut transversally through the three spheres. We find unexpected and new cooperations between citizen, scientists and civil servants. Likewise, ac- tions developed through the platform, mainly reporting, counting campaigns and early alert systems attest new modes of action that transgress the functional and ontological division of the three spheres.