Citizen Science: Design and Engagement

Press Room

• Trip Report: Dagstuhl Seminar on Citizen Science
  Blog entry, published August 2, 2017.

Summary

Citizen science is an approach to science that is enlisting the help of millions of volunteers across a range of academic disciplines to complete tasks that would have otherwise been unfeasible to tackle using expert time or computational methods [2]. While it is a popular and effective way to solve various problems, with many examples of incredible success [3, 1], there remains a number of ongoing challenges that must be addressed in order to ensure the validity of citizen science as a widespread approach to research. The aim of this workshop - organised in partnership with the SOCIAM and Stars4All projects - was to discuss and explore aspects of the future of citizen science, focusing on design factors and engagement strategies, although this naturally required a holistic assessment of citizen science projects, platforms and applications as a whole.

References

1. Jeehung Lee, Wipapat Kladwang, Minjae Lee, Daniel Cantu, Martin Azizyan, Hanjoo Kim, Alex Limpaecher, Snehal Gaikwad, Sungroh Yoon, Adrien Treuille et al. RNA Design Rules from a Massive Open Laboratory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, 111; 6, 2122–2127, 2014.
2. Chris J Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Anže Slosar, Kate Land, Bamford Steven, Daniel Thomas, Jordan M Raddick, Robert C Nichol, Alex Szalay and Dan Andreescu et al. Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK, 389; 3, 1179–1189, 2008.
3. Chris J Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, William Keel, Hanny Van Arkel, Nicola Bennert, Edward Edmondson, Daniel Thomas, Daniel JB Smith, Peter D Herbert, Matt J Jarvis et al. Galaxy Zoo:‘Hanny’s Voorwerp’, a quasar light echo?. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK, 399; 1, 129–140,2009. 17272