Conclusion

With the support of the CEC, the LEO Network has expanded and improved considerably in the last year. This has not only increased the number of LEO Members, Observations, Communities, and Projects, but has also contributed many excellent ideas, use-cases, and scenarios to the network. One example is multilingual support. The support for multiple languages now within the LEO system - started with French and Spanish as part of this project - has now been expanded to cover many circumpolar and indigenous languages, and has opened up LEO to many new communities.

What's Next

The LEO team, along with our hub partners, are pursuing a number of new directions for LEO in the coming years. A common theme for us will be engagement of new members, organizations, and communities. For example:

• We hope to continue to expand into new regions, first by building interest among local LEO members, and ultimately by establishing new hubs. Support for additional languages will continue to be important. At the time of this writing, we have active language translation efforts in Iñupiaq, Yup'ik, Mongolian, Japanese, and Portuguese. These are all volunteer efforts. We think language translation is a valuable and straightforward way for new LEO members to get involved, and we think our multilingual focus will increase as a result.
• We hope to engage new organizations and communities by providing unique, valuable tools for them. For example, we envision LEO as potentially critical infrastructure for many scientific initiatives, because it provides a local, human-level view of phenomena that are typically studied at a much larger scale. Likewise, we envision LEO as an important resource for the communities themselves, as it provides access to subject-matter expertise that would otherwise be elusive. Finally, we will continue to take a cooperative approach with other citizen science networks, of which there are many. Our goal is to further their efforts, not compete with them, so outreach and collaboration will continue to be important for us.
• Finally, while LEO has been successful at engaging "super-observers" in Alaska and elsewhere, we believe there are lower tiers of observer that would willingly participate in LEO if they had a convenient, rewarding way to do so. We hope to bring alternative engagement paths for those LEO members. For example, while relatively few LEO members write lengthy, thoughtful observational narratives, many members would happily participate in a "me-too" capacity, essentially agreeing or disagreeing with an observation that has already been posted by another member. A second example is mainstream news coverage of environmental events. We believe that there are many "news hounds" who are well-versed in environmental phenomena even if they aren't witnessing them first-hand. We think there's a place for this type of contribution to the LEO Network, and we've begun experimentally collecting news coverage where it compliments our existing observation posts.

We look forward to the continued growth of LEO in the coming years, and thank the CEC for their support in this endeavor.