Title
From Crowd to Community: A Survey of Online Community Features in Citizen Science Projects.
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/2998181.2998302
CSCW
Keywords
Field
DocType
Citizen science, online communities, survey
Online community,Computer science,Knowledge management,Human computation,Citizen science,Scientific method
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
17
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Neal Reeves130.71
Ramine Tinati214218.86
Sergej Zerr315815.85
Max Van Kleek454258.95
Elena Simperl51069122.60