Influence on policy challenges and opportunities The promise of reaching out to broad audiences and popularising scientific research has clearly put Citizen Science on the agendas of policy makers in Europe and elsewhere. There is a huge interest from research funding bodies, but also from high-level research policy makers to make science more understandable to the public and to involve more people in science and research. There are several objectives for policy makers in this respect: they range from interesting more (young) people from scientific fields thus filling a gap in STEM-education in many countries. Also, there is the interest to justify apparently large budgets spent on topics that are notoriously difficult to justify to the xxxxxx, e.g. in high-energy physics etc. While this interest is certainly laudable, it is less clear from DITOs that it can be easily addressed with just a large-scale outreach activity. Results from the formative evaluation make it very clear that event facilitators are often much more interested in their own audiences rather than in establishing contacts with policy makers or preparing presentations and documents for policy makers. Consequently, dedicated effort is required to establish and maintain such links between the audiences, facilitators and policy representatives. In DITOs, the main activity reaching out to policy makers was the creation of dedicated policy briefs. This activity meant that DITOs experts - including facilitators of events - needed to think about the relevance of their activities to policy making. It provided a real opportunity for reframing DITOs event activities in a larger picture of policy making. The process itself often led to important workshop activities and exchanges with a range of stakeholders - typical of policy processes such as the creation of a policy document. There were also interesting synergies between different topical aspects of policy briefs. For example, DITOs partner xxxxxx was involved in the creation of a policy brief on the synergies between open (digital) science and citizen science. This brief involved large groups of experts and was presented to the European Commission in a dedicated meeting in Brussels. From this event, a second policy brief emerged that targeted potential synergies of art/science and citizen science. This resulted in a local stakeholder roundtable in Vienna with members of the Austrian art/science, the open science and the citizen science communities. This was the first...
