Encourage Greater Public Participation in Science (US0123)

Public participation in the scientific process by individual citizens—including through Federal prize competitions, challenges, and crowdsourcing—can help connect a wide range of the American public to their communities, to the environment, to Federal agencies, to the science and technology innovation ecosystem, and beyond. These participatory tools can help us to better understand both what science is capable of and its limitations. Citizen science, prize competitions, challenges, and crowd- sourcing also have the potential to change communities’ relationships to science and innovation for the better by creating two-way streets of communication. Local communities can tell us what is important to them and 9 establish solutions that work for them. At the same time, scientists can make their research more relevant and grounded in those communities, increasing the reach and impact of Federal science and innovation efforts. For these reasons, the Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting citizen science efforts, such as the challenge launched earlier this year in partnership with the U.K. Government to develop privacy-preserving solutions for training artificial intelligence models. Looking ahead, most agencies implementing prize compe- titions and challenges in recent years have indicated that they will continue to leverage such competitions and challenges, and the Biden-Harris Administration will commit to supporting these efforts to stimulate innova- tion, develop solutions to challenging problems, and advance core Administration and agency priorities.

Federal agencies have also published their multi-year Learning Agendas and Annual Evaluation Plans as required by the Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act. These evidence-building plans transparently describe agencies’ priority research questions and are available on agency websites and linked in a central location on the new evaluation.gov website. Evaluation.gov also includes a Learning Agenda Question Dashboard that compiles all agency questions in one place so that researchers and members of the public can explore where evidence is most needed. This allows those external to government to consider how their own research can be most poli- cy-relevant, as well as how they might collaborate with Federal agencies to build evidence in priority areas.