Opening up the Zooniverse : Building a Scalable Platform for Online Citizen Science

With more than a million registered volunteers, more than thirty projects and nearly a hundred peer reviewed papers, the Zooniverse is amongst the world’s most successful platforms for online citizen science. Growing from... [ view full abstract ]

With more than a million registered volunteers, more than thirty projects and nearly a hundred peer reviewed papers, the Zooniverse is amongst the world’s most successful platforms for online citizen science. Growing from its beginnings as a single astrophysics project in 2007, it now encompassing projects in ecology, meteorology, particle physics and more.

The experienced gained in producing these projects and their subsequent success (or failure) has led to the development of a set of best practices in experiment design. A rebuild of the Zooniverse system will allow researchers to build, test and deploy citizen science projects as easily as launching a Wordpress blog.

This talk, from Zooniverse PI Chris Lintott (University of Oxford), will review this progress, but then consider the problems these developments cause. What does a community engaged in 200, not 20, projects look like? What requirements should fall on the researchers, and conversely what can be expected from the volunteers? How do we avoid a tragedy of the commons in which effort is spread too thinly? Our approach to these questions is driven by a desire to maximise the scientific potential of our projects, but also by a desire for a more community-led, ‘bottom-up’ approach. In exploring these tensions at the meeting we hope to be able to reach conclusions informed by many of those with expertise in the field.