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AutSPACEs is a community and a citizen science platform which will be used to investigate how sensory processing differences affect the ways autistic people navigate the world around them. Our goals are:
- Collect: to collect together the stories of autistic people and their supporters about how they are affected by sensory processing in their daily lives. This will form a qualitative dataset for research.
- Share: to create a safe, autism-voice-first online environment for autistic people and their supporters to share their stories. These can then be read by others who can benefit from their experiences and insights.
- Educate: to educate non-autistic people about the experiences of autistic people so that they can become better supporters to them, and to reduce misunderstandings and stigmas about autism.
- Change: use research done on the dataset to inform policy-makers and people who build and design environments how to make those spaces better for autistic people.
AutSPACEs is a collaborative project between The Alan Turing Institute – the UK's national institute for data science and AI – and Autistica, the UK's biggest research charity on Autism. But AutSPACEs is also you, as we are a citizen science community it is also run, shaped, and designed by its participants. You can find all of our contributors on the project README.
Once launched, users of the AutSPACEs platform will have the option to view other's stories or to submit their own. They must sign in to submit. All users have the option of submitting their story for research, publishing their story on the platform itself, neither, or both. If it is published, it will first be moderated to make sure it follows the platform's code of conduct. While logged in, users will be able to view their own stories and change their consent options.
The platform is being developed using the Python/Django web development framework. Users will be able to share experiences through a website which will then be deposited into a backend database supported by Open Humans. The platform is entirely open source. All code is available to be used and adapted. Everyone is invited to contribute.
The design for the platform is created according to specifications made by autistic people and their supporters. It is build with, for, and by the autistic community. In this Wiki you can find more information about this.
We believe that the people who will be affected most by research should have opportunities to make decisions, set the direction, and be involved in the research process throughout.
We believe that the world should work for autistic people so that they can flourish as well as function, and we share a mission with our original sponsor Autistica for autistic people have happier, healthier, longer lives. Autism research should fundamentally serve autistic people and improve their lives.
We believe you should have control over how your data is shared and who it is shared with. We will never sell your data.