Online citizen science projects have demonstrated their usefulness for research, however little is known about the potential benefits for volunteers. We conducted 39 interviews (28 volunteers, 11 researchers) to gain a greater understanding of volunteers' motivations, learning and creativity (MLC). In our MLC model we explain that participating and progressing in a project community provides volunteers with many indirect opportunities for learning and creativity. The more aspects that volunteers are involved in, the more likely they are to sustain their participation in the project. These results have implications for the design and management of online citizen science projects. It is important to provide users with tools to communicate in order to supporting social learning, community building and sharing.
AbstractCitizen science; Informal learning; Public engagement with science and technology
Keywords
Estimation of the presence of people in real time is extremely useful for businesses in providing better services while saving money. In this paper, we propose a technique for estimating the number of mobile devices present at a certain place and time, through analysis of WiFi probe requests from smart devices. Our goal is to address the problem through a solution that is immune to Media Access Control (MAC) address randomization strategies. The idea is to make use of information propagated in the environment, without the need to know the real MAC addresses of the devices. A state machine was modeled to detect the arrival, presence, and departure of devices in proximity to the sensors. A hardware prototype was developed for device detection, and its efficiency was evaluated in experiments that involved comparing the results of the proposed method with the manual measurements made by researchers. The proposed method provided very accurate correlations between the number of mobile devices detected and the real number of people in the environment.
Recent behavioral and cultural changes driven by the paradigm of mass collaboration highlighted the phenomenon of crowdsourcing as an innovative and promising production model, with positive effects in several business areas. In the field of music, the so called wave of crowds has fostered creative processes where people from anywhere in the world with Internet access can collaborate in different ways in musical productions, even not being practitioners. The present work is a study of crowd computing applications in the context of music, with an eye towards the crowdsourcing phenomena. We investigate forms of collaboration involving crowds and the available platforms. We also discuss the challenges coupled to this domain and propose a research agenda.
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