This completed project was a two-phase theory-based study of virtual organizations that enable massive virtual collaboration in scientific research. The virtual organizations studied have a core of scientists and project leaders coordinating the work of a larger number of volunteer contributors, a format called citizen science. The project was directed at advancing the understanding of what constitutes effective citizen science virtual organizations and under what conditions citizen science virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific and education production and innovation. The study was theoretically grounded in small group theory and rooted empirically in a survey of and case studies in citizen science projects. A survey was used to develop a typology of citizen science projects, illuminating the important dimensions of this form. The case studies identified key lever points in work design for enabling citizen science virtual organizations to involve distributed, diverse volunteers in producing large-scale, high quality, valued scientific research in an organizationally sustainable fashion.
Publications from the grant are listed below.
<p>Crowdsourcing work with high levels of coupling between tasks poses challenges for coordination. This paper presents a study of two online citizen science projects that involved volunteers in such tasks: not just analyzing bulk data but also interpreting data and writing a paper for publication in one project and identifying new classes of data in the other. However, extending the reach of citizen science adds tasks with more dependencies, which calls for more elaborate coordination mechanisms but the relationship between the project and volunteers limits how work can be coordinated. Contrariwise, a mismatch between dependencies and available coordination mechanisms can be expected to lead to performance problems. The results of the study offer recommendations for design of citizen science projects for advanced tasks.</p>
<p>This paper develops an organization design-oriented conceptual model of scientific knowledge production through citizen science virtual organizations. Citizen science is a form of organization design for collaborative scientific research involving scientists and volunteers, for which Internet-based modes of participation enable massive virtual collaboration by thousands of members of the public. The conceptual model provides an example of a theory development process and discusses its application to an exploratory study. The paper contributes a multi-level process model for organizing investigation into the impact of design on this form of scientific knowledge production.</p>
<p>Citizen science is a form of research collaboration involving members of the public in scientific research projects to address real-world problems. Often organized as a virtual collaboration, these projects are a type of open movement, with collective goals addressed through open participation in research tasks. Existing typologies of citizen science projects focus primarily on the structure of participation, paying little attention to the organizational and macrostructural properties that are important to designing and managing effective projects and technologies. By examining a variety of project characteristics, we identified five types—Action, Conservation, Investigation, Virtual, and Education—that differ in primary project goals and the importance of physical environment to participation.</p>
<p>Citizen science is a form of research collaboration involving members of the public in scientific research projects to address real-world problems. Often organized as a virtual collaboration, these projects are a type of open movement, with collective goals addressed through open participation in research tasks. We conducted a survey of citizen science projects to elicit multiple aspects of project design and operation. We then clustered projects based on the tasks performed by participants and on the project’s stated goals. The clustering results group projects that show similarities along other dimensions, suggesting useful divisions of the projects.</p>
<p>This poster presents initial findings from a dissertation pilot study on a citizen science project involving the public with scientists in collaborative research. The goal for the pilot study was familiarity with the contextual factors that influence citizen science project design, and in turn, observing how the design choices contribute to the project's knowledge creation and participation outcomes. The initial results highlight an unexpected form of `middle-out' organizing that challenges assumptions about top-down and bottom-up organizing, as the location of the top and bottom are clearly a matter of perspective in inter-organizational partnerships.</p>
<p>Citizen science has seen enormous growth in recent years, in part due to the influence of the Internet, and a corresponding growth in interest. However, the few stand-out examples that have received attention from media and researchers are not representative of the diversity of the field as a whole, and therefore may not be the best models for those seeking to study or start a citizen science project. In this work, we present the results of a survey of citizen science project leaders, identifying sub-groups of project types according to a variety of features related to project design and management, including funding sources, goals, participant activities, data quality processes, and social interaction. These combined features highlight the diversity of citizen science, providing an overview of the breadth of the phenomenon and laying a foundation for comparison between citizen science projects and to other online communities.</p>
<p>Citizen science creates a nexus between science and education that, when coupled with emerging technologies, expands the frontiers of ecological research and public engagement. Using representative technologies and other examples, we examine the future of citizen science in terms of its research processes, program and participant cultures, and scientific communities. Future citizen-science projects will likely be influenced by sociocultural issues related to new technologies and will continue to face practical programmatic challenges. We foresee networked, open science and the use of online computer/video gaming as important tools to engage non-traditional audiences, and offer recommendations to help prepare project managers for impending challenges. A more formalized citizen-science enterprise, complete with networked organizations, associations, journals, and cyberinfrastructure, will advance scientific research, including ecology, and further public education.</p>