VizChitra 2025: India's first community-driven Data Visualization conference

Talk description
Across India, citizen science is quietly reshaping how we gather environmental, ecological, and urban data. From bird counts and tree tracking to air quality monitoring and waste mapping, thousands of people contribute to science in their free time—often armed with nothing more than a phone, curiosity, and a willingness to observe.

This Birds of a Feather session invites an open, participatory conversation on contributing to and working with citizen science in India. We’ll begin by looking at impactful projects that have harnessed community-generated data to inform research, policy, and public awareness

The heart of the session will be a collaborative exercise: co-creating a live Field Guide to Citizen Science. Together, we’ll crowdsource a list of platforms, mobile apps, and initiatives that make it easy to participate. We’ll also discuss the challenges—data quality, access to curated datasets, and how to return insights back to the communities that contribute.

Whether you’re a citizen scientist, developer, researcher, or just curious, this session offers space to share experiences, explore possibilities, and imagine new pathways for participatory science in India.

Takeaways

• A crowdsourced Field Guide to Citizen Science in India you can use and share.
• Quick ways to start contributing as a citizen—with just your phone and curiosity.
• Ideas for using public data in research, design, or storytelling.
• Insights into how platforms handle data quality and public engagement.

Intended audience

• Curious citizens looking for meaningful ways to engage with science and local issues.
• Researchers, designers, and developers interested in using citizen science data for storytelling, analysis, or public-interest projects.
• Educators and community organizers who want to introduce citizen science in classrooms or local initiatives.
• Anyone who wants to understand the potential (and limitations) of crowdsourced data in the Indian context.

Facilitator bio

An engineer turned ecologist, but mostly juat a reluctant adult , Tara is a lover of maps, tidy data, and all things animal. With one foot in the forest and the other in the cloud (satellite, that is), She enjoys translating messy, ground-level realities into clean datasets and back again. She’s worked with camera traps, code, and communities—and is currently geeking out over citizen science apps.

For professional stuff here’s linkedin - Tara Rajendran . But she would much prefer an email (even just to say hi!) at tararaj@gmail.com.