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Methods and guidelines for the
design and analysis of online citizen
science*
Elena Simperl, University of Southampton, UK
*with slides by Ramine Tinati, Markus Luczak-Rösch, and others
Overview
• Background to citizen science
• Citizen science & human computation
• Citizen science & online communities
• Citizen science & science
• Methods and design guidelines
Studying citizen science: human computation
• Task design
• Task assignment
• Answer validation and aggregation
• Contributors’ performance
• Motivation and incentives
Studying citizen science: online community
• Roles and activities
• Patterns of participation
• Motivation and incentives
• Evolution in time
Levels of engagement
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31
Acti
ve u
sers
in
%
Month since registration
~1% of participants contribute 72% of Talk & 29% of Task
Beyond data collection and analysis
• Discussion and community engagement are
integral part of the experience
Discussion profiles
Deeply
engaged
volunteers, few
threads but
multiple posts
within them
9 0.1
%
Content
producers,
posting across
many boards
and threads
7 0.1
%
Thread
followers and
PM (one-to-
one) talkers
8 0.4
%
First to
respond and
question
answerers 4 1%
Highly active
thread starters
and answerers
across a wide
range of topics
1 2.8
%
Infrequent
volunteers,
single thread
posts, no
personal
messages
5 5.5
%
Watcher and
starter of
many threads,
but not first to
reply
3 6.5
%
Highly active
thread
starters and
first to reply
back
2 14.6
%
Long active
volunteers (the
core group),
posting
sporadically
6 69.0
%
Talking does not mean less work
How long do games take to complete depending on when the chat messages are made?
Games took longer to complete when chat messages were being made during the
gaming session, compare to games that had messages before or after.
Designing platforms
Task specificity
Community development
Task design PR and
engagement
Bootstrapping the
community
Serendipitous
scientific discovery
Engaging with people,
supporting profession
team
Supporting individuals,
finding new scientific
discoveries
Obtaining new
citizen scientists
Retaining people
Supporting people,
improving task
completion
Obtaining new citizen
scientists
Reinvigorating old
users
What’s next?
• Human computation
• Task assignment: what tasks are interesting/relevant for whom?
• Peer review, collaborative approaches
• The role of gamification: is science a game?
• Online community
• Mapping design patterns to online community design frameworks: do CS form a community?
• Making discussions more effective
• Science
• Citizen science platforms that everyone can use
Publications
R. Tinati, M. Van Kleek, E. Simperl, M. Luczak-Rösch, R. Simpson and N. Shadbolt. Designing for citizen data analysis: a cross-sectional case study of a multi-domain citizen science platform. Proceedings of ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014 (CHI2015), pages 1-10, 2015. M. Luczak-Rösch, R. Tinati, E. Simperl, M. Van Kleek, N. Shadbolt and R. Simpson. Why Won't Aliens Talk to Us? Content and Community Dynamics in Online Citizen Science. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM2014), 2014.
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