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From crowd to community: a survey of online community features in citizen science projects

From crowd to community: a survey of online community features in citizen science projects
From crowd to community: a survey of online community features in citizen science projects
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.
2137-2152
Association for Computing Machinery
Reeves, Neal
80e12072-7fc9-47ab-850e-649b7c0a7271
Tinati, Ramine
f74a0556-6a04-40c5-8bcf-6f5235dbf687
Zerr, Sergej
0d1a9e2d-d0fc-4683-a762-bfa7f523ce3d
Van Kleek, Max
d91d9d82-83cc-477b-943f-eaba8b8fdc0c
Simperl, Elena
40261ae4-c58c-48e4-b78b-5187b10e4f67
Reeves, Neal
80e12072-7fc9-47ab-850e-649b7c0a7271
Tinati, Ramine
f74a0556-6a04-40c5-8bcf-6f5235dbf687
Zerr, Sergej
0d1a9e2d-d0fc-4683-a762-bfa7f523ce3d
Van Kleek, Max
d91d9d82-83cc-477b-943f-eaba8b8fdc0c
Simperl, Elena
40261ae4-c58c-48e4-b78b-5187b10e4f67

Reeves, Neal, Tinati, Ramine, Zerr, Sergej, Van Kleek, Max and Simperl, Elena (2017) From crowd to community: a survey of online community features in citizen science projects. In Proceedings of the 2017CS W '17 : Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 2137-2152 . (doi:10.1145/2998181.2998302).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

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.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 7 September 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 25 February 2017
Published date: 25 February 2017
Venue - Dates: 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017), Portland, United States, 2017-02-25 - 2017-03-01
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 401344
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/401344
PURE UUID: 2fbf5a35-e078-44a7-a1ac-6ec160c0876f
ORCID for Elena Simperl: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-947X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 17 Oct 2016 09:37
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 06:42

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Contributors

Author: Neal Reeves
Author: Ramine Tinati
Author: Sergej Zerr
Author: Max Van Kleek
Author: Elena Simperl ORCID iD

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