From Crowd to Community

Abstract

Online citizen science projects have been increasingly used in a variety of disciplines and contexts to enable large-scale scientific research. The successes of such projects have encouraged the development of customisable platforms to enable anyone to run their own citizen science project. However, the process of designing and building a citizen science project remains complex, with projects requiring both human computation and social aspects to sustain user motivation and achieve project goals. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey of 48 citizen science projects to identify common features and functionality. Supported by online community literature, we use structured walkthroughs to identify different mechanisms used to encourage volunteer contributions across four dimensions: task visibility, goals, feedback, and rewards. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on citizen science design and the relationship between community and microtask design for achieving successful outcomes.

Affordances and tensions in recording bird observations: how coordinators and volunteers perceive and experience citizen science in birding

“…Affordances that stimulate data quality are often implemented, with little attention to how these implementations affect the users' understanding of citizen science. On the other hand, some design choices are made to increase engagement and retention of citizen scientists [Reeves et al, 2017;Tinati et al, 2015]. A design might then be based on knowledge about the motivations or behaviour of citizen scientists, leading to the integration of affordances such as discussion forums, rewards or rankings.…”

“…So far, studies into the design of citizen science portals have focused on the design of the portal itself, and have not thoroughly integrated the experience of users or the intentions of project coordinators into these studies [August et al, 2015;Gouveia et al, 2004;Reeves et al, 2017]. Studies into the experiences of citizen science projects have mostly focused on the motivations of and benefits for citizen scientists [Ganzevoort, van den Born et al, 2017;Haywood, 2016;Wright et al, 2015].…”

Improving the Results of Citizen Science Projects Through Reputation Systems: The Case of Wolf’s Number Experiment

“…Nowadays there are a relevant number of citizen science projects around the world. [30] and [31] perform a walkthrough of different projects to investigate its common features. The list of citizen science projects in Astronomy keeps growing [32], with some examples of projects related with the solar activity:…”

Coordinating Advanced Crowd Work: Extending Citizen Science

“…One coordination problem in these projects results from a task-actor dependency that requires a task assignment coordination mechanism to match a task (an image to be classified) to an actor (a volunteer). This dependency is handled by the system simply giving the next image to be classified to the next available volunteer who has not already seen it (Reeves et al 2017). This approach has the advantage of being simple and requiring almost no information about the image or volunteer.…”