Coordinating Advanced Crowd Work: Extending Citizen Science

Crowston, Kevin; Mitchell, Erica; Østerlund, Carsten

doi:10.24251/hicss.2018.212

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This is still needed, as many scientists are still reticent to acknowledge the contribution of citizen scientists to science [Golumbic et al, 2017]. Although there has been movement towards giving citizen scientists a greater influence [Crowston, Mitchell and Østerlund, 2018], the webcomics example can be learnt from. By opening up more of the scientific process to volunteers, reducing some of the formal infrastructure and allowing them to contribute to the formation of scientific cases and conclusions, a more engaged and informed community could result.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other users carry out their own investigations and post questions and results on project forums. However, working as a crowd on more complex tasks that would usually be taken on by professionals, for example paper writing, still faces strong barriers due to knowledge gaps surrounding the scientific process [Crowston, Mitchell and Østerlund, 2018]. There is also still concern among some professional scientists that citizen scientists do not make real contributions to science and the only real benefits are for the public rather than the scientists [Golumbic et al, 2017].…”

Section: Citizen Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Citizen science and the professional-amateur divide: lessons from differing online practices

Dowthwaite¹,

Sprinks²

2019

JCOM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online citizen science platforms increasingly provide types of infrastructural support previously only available to organisationally-based professional scientists. Other practices, such as creative arts, also exploit the freedom and accessibility afforded by the World Wide Web to shift the professional-amateur relationship. This paper compares communities from these two areas to show that disparate practices can learn from each other to better understand their users and their technology needs. Three major areas are discussed: mutual acknowledgement, infrastructural support, and platform specialisation. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of differing practices, and lessons that can be learnt for online citizen science platforms.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Citizen Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen science and the professional-amateur divide: lessons from differing online practices

Dowthwaite¹,

Sprinks²

2019

JCOM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Whilst it is true past citizen science research has acknowledged differences between its users, this has been normally been through post-hoc analysis of existing projects considering the effect on data validation [Freitag, Meyer and Whiteman, 2016], or changes in volunteer motivation [Jackson et al, 2015]. Future citizen science endeavors should seek to accommodate these differences, their relationships and the elaborate mechanics required [Crowston, Mitchell and Østerlund, 2018] at the design stage, in order to develop social and collaborative motivations that encourage commitment and ultimately improve the analysis produced.…”

Section: Capitalize On Individual Differences As An Organizational Stmentioning

confidence: 99%

A sociotechnical system approach to virtual citizen science: an application of BS ISO 27500:2016

Houghton¹,

Sprinks²,

Wardlaw³

et al. 2019

JCOM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We discuss the potential application to virtual citizen science of a recent standard (BS ISO 27500:2016 “The human-centred organisation”) which encourages the adoption of a sociotechnical systems perspective across a wide range of businesses, organizations and ventures. Key tenets of the standard concern taking a total systems approach, capitalizing on individual differences as a strength, making usability and accessibility strategic objectives, valuing personnel and paying attention to ethical and values-led elements of the project in terms of being open and trustworthy, social responsibility and health and wellbeing. Drawing upon our experience of projects in our laboratory and the wider literature, we outline the principles identified in the standard and offer citizen science themed interpretations and examples of possible responses.

show abstract

“…They contrast a continuing highly successful project that classifies galaxies with a highly unsuccessful project that sought to involve citizen scientists in the process of writing an academic paper. The findings highlight how crowds and communities of amateurs may be effective on tasks that exhibit high parallelism and low coordination dependencies, but may struggle with tasks that demand close synchronization, complex integration, and deep process knowledge [2].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Deception can be detected by hybrid systems [4]; tools can help us understand political events [5]; and automated judging of news is problematic [1]. Interactive visualization is an important step for understanding crowd input [3], and organizing volunteers to produce collective intelligence is still an open and important research challenge [2].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%