INot all partners of a project may be supportive of the policy to publish citizen-collected data.
Many project take place in collaboration with local authorities that recognize the potential of
citizen participation and data collecting contributions but are not clear yet how to respond to
the inputs provided by the public, and how to integrate them into the well-established
information flows, which are often regulated by legal requirements. How can data collected
by the public on air quality, water quality or noise, often with equipment of low quality, be
reconciled with better quality but more sparse observations from official sources? How to
manage the debates between the measured magnitude of a phenomenon and the public
perception of the same phenomenon informed by observations maybe of lower quality but
amplified by the very large numbers of observers? These are not easy questions to address
in this early stage of the Citizen Science phenomena, and it is not surprising that many
public authorities have difficulties in finding consistent answers.