Citizen science survey results published

Earlier this year, my first journal publication as faculty at UMD, “Surveying the citizen science landscape”, reported on results of a survey of citizen science projects that I conducted as a PhD student. The most important take-away is that citizen science is incredibly diverse. Just like in the early days of studying open source software, research and media often call attention to a few outliers that don’t really represent the full richness of the broader community of practice. In addition to a few such large-scale projects, our survey results primarily describe small-to-medium sized citizen science projects, mostly in North America, and largely focused on collecting ecological data. There are a few common strategies, characteristics, and feature sets that describe most of these projects for any given variable of interest, such as funding sources, data quality strategies, and the kinds of task-oriented and social activities available to volunteers. But these variables were all uniquely combined for each project, as the design of the entire enterprise has to work within the constraints imposed by resources, scientific standards, and project goals. There was no obvious cookie-cutter pattern of “right answers” to address common questions in project design. Like any other research, doing science with the involvement of volunteers requires designing within specific limitations in order to achieve specific outcomes, and the constraints each project faces are unique. There’s no magic formula to identify which combination of characteristics will create the right conditions for a particular project, of course. However, by describing the range of project characteristics and strategies for key operational considerations, we hope to help practitioners make important decisions about citizen science...

Open Knowledge Lab at UMD is Open!

Organizing a new research lab is a little like growing a garden: it takes a little time for the seeds to germinate. The Open Knowledge Lab* has been incubating over the 2014-2015 school year since Dr. Andrea Wiggins‘ arrival at the UMD iSchool, and we’re finally ready to launch with an exciting crew, a great portfolio of research projects, a few new publications, several grants, and a shiny new website. The first big news actually came months ago, when an NSF grant was awarded for the Biocubes project, which is now in full swing. Since then, we’ve also received seed grant funding and support for a cross-disciplinary workshop on crowdsourcing, so we actually have quite a backlog of great news to share. More importantly, we’re staffing up with a fantastic team. Doctoral candidate Yurong He has been deeply involved in the Biocubes project since before its official launch, and has incorporated the project into her dissertation research, while doctoral student Brenna McNally has been advising us on working with youth-focused technologies. This summer, Dr. Alyson Young will join our team to assist in a new study focused on understanding the role of data provenance in scientific innovation. And in the fall–mere months away now–Jonathan Brier will join the team as a new PhD student, broadening our perspective on social computing in citizen science. We are also pleased to be launching several brand-new projects with some great partners, and there are several events to announce as well–more details to come!   *We’re not the first “open knowledge lab” but it really is the right name for what we study. We’re...