%0 Conference Proceedings %B Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-48) %D 2015 %T Motivations for sustained participation in crowdsourcing: The role of talk in a citizen science case study %A Corey Brian Jackson %A Carsten Østerlund %A Gabriel Mugar %A Kevin Crowston %A Katie DeVries Hassman %X

The paper explores the motivations of volunteers in a large crowd sourcing project and contributes to our understanding of the motivational factors that lead to deeper engagement beyond initial participation. Drawing on the theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and the literature on motivation in crowd sourcing, we analyze interview and trace data from a large citizen science project. The analyses identify ways in which the technical features of the projects may serve as motivational factors leading participants towards sustained participation. The results suggest volunteers first engage in activities to support knowledge acquisition and later share knowledge with other volunteers and finally increase participation in Talk through a punctuated process of role discovery.

%B Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-48) %C Koloa, HI %8 1/2015 %> https://citsci.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/Motivation%20in%20Talk%20Submitted_FINAL%28Formatted%29.pdf %0 Conference Proceedings %B 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2014) %D 2014 %T Planet Hunters and Seafloor Explorers: Legitimate Peripheral Participation Through Practice Proxies in Online Citizen Science %A Gabriel Mugar %A Carsten Østerlund %A Katie DeVries Hassman %A Kevin Crowston %A Corey Brian Jackson %X

Making the traces of user participation in primary activities visible in online crowdsourced initiatives has been shown to help new users understand the norms of participation but participants do not always have access to others’ work. Through a combination of virtual and trace ethnography we explore how new users in two online citizen science projects engage other traces of activity as a way of compensating. Merging the theory of legitimate peripheral participation with Erickson and Kellogg’s theory of social translucence we introduce the concept of practice proxies; traces of user activities in online environment that act as resources to orient newcomers towards the norms of practice. Our findings suggest that newcomers seek out practice proxies in the social features of the projects that highlight contextualized and specific characteristics of primary work practice.

%B 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2014) %8 2/2014 %R 10.1145/2531602.2531721 %> https://citsci.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/paper_revised%20copy%20to%20post.pdf %0 Conference Paper %B Computer Supported Collaborative Learning %D 2013 %T Learning at the Seafloor, Looking at the Sky: The Relationship Between Individual Tasks and Collaborative Engagement in Two Citizen Science Projects %A Katie DeVries Hassman %A Gabriel Mugar %A Carsten Østerlund %A Corey Jackson %B Computer Supported Collaborative Learning %> https://citsci.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/CSCL%202013%20Poster%20Final.pdf %> https://citsci.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/Posterv2.pdf