Romain Julliard is professor of Ecology at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, France. Over the last 20 years, he has been a key actor in the development of citizen sciences in France. From the initial project of producing the right data at the right scale for the purpose of monitoring the fate of biodiversity facing global changes, he is now proposing the concept and associated methodology, that people can be engaged in co-producing high value data that empower them individually and collectively. Applications for such quality data production associated to collective intelligence may be numerous, and complementary to the big data paradigm.