8. Public laboratory: Play and civic engagement

Breen, Jessica; Dosemagen, Shannon; Blair, Don; Barry, Liz

doi:10.1515/9789048535200-010

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Public Lab's mission is to empower communities to advocate for environmental justice, so it explicitly targets newcomers and encourages them to learn how to conduct their own studies. Endorsing trial-and-error as a key part of research 17 , the platform incorporates features that encourage asking questions, sketching problems and solution approaches, and reproducing each other's work. or by calls for participation to upload specific types of observations.…”

Section: These Differences Become Already Apparent In the Self-stated...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such meta-research efforts on citizen science platforms have mostly focused on crowdsourcing aspects to investigate user behaviors, for example as they relate to learning norms of practice 12 , coordinated action 13 , and data quality 14 , or to derive design claims 15 and guidelines 16 for creating successful projects. While there are dedicated platforms that support community-led citizen science projects, such as Public Lab 17 , they typically operate at a smaller scale than crowdsourcing platforms, and to date there has been less meta-research about them. In addition, bottom-up initiatives usually operate on a smaller scale, often developing or adapting data collection and analysis tools to their local context 8 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

2022

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Section: These Differences Become Already Apparent In the Self-stated...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

2022

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“…Volunteers assist professional researchers from all kinds of domains in a crowdsourcing approach, by classifying data for their projects on the platform zooniverse.org. Zooniverse developed from the Galaxy Zoo project and is now a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the the BP oil disaster at the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, when residents documented the extent of the damage in a grassroot mapping effort using weather balloons (Breen et al, 2019). As of now, there are more than 1600 registered users displayed on the website, who created numerous tools, available as DIY instructions on the website or DIY kits on the store, software projects and overview pages for the monitoring of environmental topics.…”

Section: Samplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Users are free to use, adapt and contribute to resources according to their particular needs, according to Public Labs perception of science as a creative, open-ended process (Breen et al, 2019). The granularity of tasks is high: It is possible to perform small tasks, like editing minor parts in wiki documents or commenting on another user's artifacts, but also to replicate research approaches or to plan and conduct whole research projects from start to finish.…”

Section: Stigmergic Basic Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…New users are invited to upload their first attempts by tagging them with first-time-posters and all users are also encouraged to upload failed attempts, under the motto "things going wrong are just as important as things succeeding" (Breen et al, 2019). In their coding community, there is a collection of first-timers only issues: simple tasks formatted using a specific template, that aim to help people who contribute to Github for the first time.…”

Section: Learning and Social Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A peer production model for citizen science: comparative analysis of three online platforms

Kloppenborg¹,

Ball²,

Tzovaras³

2021

Preprint

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Citizen science is an umbrella term covering a broad range of practices, all related to engaging individuals actively in scientific research. There is a tension about the nature and scope of participation in citizen science, with the majority of projects being scientific authority-driven crowdsourcing approaches, allowing individuals to perform only narrowly defined microtasks. On the other side of the spectrum, there is peer production: A decentralized way of production that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals, known for example from open source software or Wikipedia.In this article, we inspect three online citizen science platforms - iNaturalist, Public Lab and Zooniverse - from a peer production perspective. We introduce a working model of peer production ecosystems that we apply to perform qualitative analyses of the projects’ online platforms. Our results show that peer production is partly already practiced in citizen science today and we provide concrete examples of features. The amount of peer production elements vary strongly between the case studies, relative to orientation of the projects as a support for professional researchers or for community activism. We argue for the potential of peer production approaches for more inclusive and democratic citizen science and aim to orient readers on why and how they might put peer production elements into practice in their own citizen science projects.

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Co-designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science

Kloppenborg,

Price Ball,

Jonas

et al. 2024

R. Soc. Open Sci.

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Personal science is the practice of addressing personally relevant health questions through self-research. Implementing personal science can be challenging, owing to the need to develop and adopt research protocols, tools and methods. While online communities can provide valuable peer support, tools for systematically accessing community knowledge are lacking. The objective of this study is to apply a participatory design process involving a community of personal science practitioners to develop a peer-produced knowledge base that supports the needs of practitioners as consumers and contributors of knowledge. The process led to the development of the Personal Science Wiki, an open repository for documenting and accessing individual self-tracking projects while facilitating the establishment of consensus knowledge. After initial design iterations and a field testing phase, we performed a user study with 21 participants to test and improve the platform, and to explore suitable information architectures. The study deepened our understanding of barriers to scaling the personal science community, established an infrastructure for knowledge management actively used by the community and provided lessons on challenges, information needs, representations and architectures to support individuals with their personal health inquiries.

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8. Public laboratory: Play and civic engagement

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

A peer production model for citizen science: comparative analysis of three online platforms

Co-designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science

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