This project brings together a team of researchers at the University of Hull and three external stakeholder groups - Hull City Council; Groundwork and Probe - to explore how Citizen Inquiry methodologies and digital technologies can improve the quality of research that has public value. An important part of our work is to ensure our research is informed and used by the people who live in the communities around us. Citizen Science is a way of designing research that involves the general public or 'citizens' as contributors and collaborators in the project. There are various methods that we can use to carry out these inquiries but there are also many barriers and challenges that typically hinder academic researchers in universities from engaging the general public with Citizen Science. One of these is small participation rates and participation which is biased towards white, middle-aged and higher-income people (Defra, 2015) This is an issue that the project will challenge by exploring how researchers and the public can co-design research designed that meets the needs of a more diverse range of the population, particularly hard to reach and under-represented communities - the communities that we most want to work with. One approach is called Citizen Inquiry which is more participatory in nature and can involve the public is designing the research, collecting and analyzing data and sharing the findings. Digital technologies, such as mobile phones, often play a significant part in this process and this project will explore their effectiveness in engaging groups that are seen as hard to reach and traditionally reluctant to engage in citizen science, such as young people. The primary aim of the project is to explore how to convince academic researchers that Citizen Science is worthwhile and can add value to their research. We contend that Citizen Inquiry with its greater participatory approach is more likely to achieve this, through, for example, helping researchers to design more effective research questions that focus on issues of greater value to the public. To explore and verify this assumption the project will work with a specific cohort of researchers at the University of Hull who are currently exploring the issue of plastics waste as part of a larger project on plastics funded by the EPSRC. These researchers are part of a team working in what is referred to as the Plastics Collaboratory at the University of Hull. The project will investigate the barriers that traditionally inhibit these researchers from engaging more with the public in the research process itself and those that inhibit the three stakeholder groups themselves from working more closely with the research community. In the first phase of the project (January - February 2020) this will involve interviews and focus groups with a cross-section of participants from these different communities, leading to a project report and set of recommendations. In the second phase of the project (March-April, 2020), the research community and the three stakeholder groups will be brought together in a collaborative half-day workshop to share their collective wisdom on the issue and to explore how they might use Citizen Inquiry methodologies in the future. This workshop will include practical, hands-on-sessions to explore how mobile technologies and particular apps can be used to undertake Citizen Inquiry projects, laying down a foundation for further activities and engagement beyond the lifetime of the project itself which, if funded, will run from January to April, 2020. The project will conclude in April 2020 with an open conference bringing together researchers and interested stakeholder groups to share the findings from the research and to explore further opportunities to design collaborative research projects and seek additional funding.