Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
Presentation from HICSS-44 on a typology of citizen science project types.
Citation preview
7 January, 2011 ~ HICSS-44
From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science
Andrea Wiggins & Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University
Introduction
✤ Citizen Science
✤ Crowdsourcing scientific research through virtual collaboration between professional researchers and the public
✤ Collective goals are addressed through open participation in research
✤ Motivations
✤ Describe landscape of citizen science
✤ Support future research, cyberinfrastructure design, and project management
Related Work
✤ More like scientific cyberinfrastructure projects than collaboratories
✤ Peer production: similar task structure but different with respect to hierarchical form, not self-organizing
✤ Communities of practice: motivation and progressive engagement
✤ Not necessarily “open science” but science with open participation, and often open data
✤ Prior typologies in the environmental sciences focus on public engagement in different steps of scientific research
Methods
✤ Landscape sampling: purposive and comprehensive in type, rather than frequency
✤ Examined 30 projects on 80 facets drawn from theoretical framework
✤ Manually collected data from the web, published reports, and interviews
✤ Example facet types: project demographics, organizational affiliations, funding sources, outcomes, processes, technologies, project and task design
✤ Inductive qualitative clustering on dominant project goals and virtuality
✤ Practitioner review: intuitive fit to experiences
Typology
Type Primary Goals Physicality
Action Action & Intervention
✓Conservation Conservation &
Stewardship✓
Investigation Science ✓Virtual Science -
Education Education & Outreach
✓
Action
✤ Volunteer-initiated participatory action research to encourage intervention in local concerns
✤ Example: Sherman’s Creek Conservation Association protected a creek through political action supported by scientific water monitoring
✤ Scientific: substantial volunteer commitment may be required; results not likely to become scholarly knowledge; variation across local projects makes aggregating data difficult
✤ Organizational: local organizing and scale; long-term sustainability
✤ Technology: minimal IT use; technology is often burdensome to maintain, and other means of coordination may be easier
Conservation
✤ Address natural resource management goals by involving citizens in stewardship for outreach and increased scope
✤ Example: Northeast Phenology Monitoring is a regional partnership for long-term ecological monitoring in the National Parks
✤ Scientific: focus on resource management decision-making; tend toward conservative research design with established volunteer groups
✤ Organizational: long-term goals and government funding sources; initiated by academics or resource managers; usually regional scale
✤ Technology: full range of sophistication, from no online data entry forms to smartphone apps for data submission of geotagged photos
Investigation
✤ Focus on scientific research goals in a physical setting
✤ Example: the Great Sunflower Project is studying ecological health through volunteers’ observations of bee visits to sunflowers
✤ Scientific: careful design for scientific validity with diverse validation methods; geospatial distribution of volunteers is an asset and a bias
✤ Organizational: larger scale; organized by academics or nonprofits; diverse sustainability strategies
✤ Technology: diverse; online data entry is standard practice, but access to data is less consistent
Virtual
✤ Similar goals to Investigation projects (scientific knowledge production), but entirely ICT-mediated and different in several other respects
✤ Example: Galaxy Zoo is classifying millions of galaxies by having volunteers judge galaxy characteristics in image recognition tasks
✤ Scientific: replication is the primary validation method; online participation requires task design that is both useful and interesting
✤ Organizational: organized by academics and supported by research funding; frequently indeterminate in duration
✤ Technology: complex custom web platforms; supports reputation rewards, friendly competition, and performance feedback
Education
✤ Education and outreach are the primary stated goals
✤ Example: Fossil Finders investigates Devonian-age fossils by partnering paleontologists with primary school classrooms
✤ Scientific: relative cost is high; wide range of scientific rigor; emphasis on scientific inquiry skills over scientifically valid results
✤ Organizational: top-down partnerships with substantial funding; intended duration and sustainability questionable
✤ Technology: online data entry is standard practice; content and functionality may differ for youth and adult audiences
Contributions & Implications
✤ Contributions
✤ Complementary to prior participation-based typologies
✤ Identifies previously unrecognized class of projects
✤ Implications
✤ Guide sampling for future research with readily identifiable info
✤ Suggests further inquiry into virtuality and task design
✤ Provides examples of project designs and technologies as a resource for future development and evaluation
Limitations & Future Work
✤ Limitations
✤ Small sample
✤ Secondary data
✤ Qualitative analysis methods
✤ Future work
✤ Citizen science project survey using quantitative analysis methods
✤ Case studies examining project types in greater depth
Questions?
✤ Thanks!
✤ Acknowledgements
✤ NSF OCI Grant 09- 43049
✤ Public Participation in Scientific Research reading group at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
✤ More
✤ http://voss.syr.edu
