Zooniverse research (2016-2017 archive)

Playground for Jim, Darren, and Aaron to build up a project analyzing volunteer management in the Zooniverse.

Action items for next meeting

 * identify things to read next and build list for Aaron
 * Ren et al. 2012
 * Faraj 2011 - network exchange patterns
 * almost wikipedia
 * social Q&A
 * leadership in FLOSS
 * add to list of citizen science reading
 * conduct more observations and tie them to 4 dimensions
 * theory
 * folk-knowledge, zooniverse best practices
 * observations
 * interface constraints
 * add more projects + smaller projects
 * look at spreadsheet for categorizing projects

Pending Action Items

 * Build out planning document draft based on Aaron's rough rationale for the project.
 * More reading (start w Zooniverse and shared leadership then move on from there).
 * almost wikipedia - Mako
 * papers on stack exchange, leadership through expertise, leadership through knowledge sharing
 * review open-source software motivation/leadership papers (Kevin Crowston lit review 2008 "free/libre open source software development, what we know and don't know")
 * CCI review chapter in zotero
 * volunteer engagement
 * (shared) leadership
 * community management
 * citizen science
 * Kevin Crowston
 * Carsten Oesterlund
 * Andrea Wiggins
 * Rob Simpson
 * Chris Lintott (academic director of zooniverse)

Meeting logs
03-29-16: laid out plans for the quarter; set some preliminary work goals.

04-04-16: talked about predicted probabilities for unrelated projects; revised and updated work goals for next week.

Goals
Spring 2016
 * Fully developed planning document including a thorough analysis plan.
 * A cleaned up dataset (variables and measures that we can model; not just raw database records).

Preliminary Project Overview
Understanding Effective Leadership and Volunteer Engagement in Citizen Science

Rationale:

Prior research investigating the mechanisms of effective crowd work and citizen science has focused on volunteer/worker motivations, algorithmic and computational techniques for quality control/improvement, and task/incentive design. Despite a number of findings indicating that the patterns of interaction between requesters and volunteers/workers shape participant experiences and work contributions in important ways, these interactions remain largely unexplored as a domain of analysis, design, and intervention. This is arguably an especially important design space in the context of citizen science, where "the crowd" consists entirely of volunteers and poor volunteer management or relations would likely result in complete project failure.

As task requesters in citizen science are scientists who perform important leadership functions for the project as a whole, we draw on prior literature analyzing effective leadership in volunteer online communities. Several studies by Haiyi Zhu and colleagues in the context of peer production show that "shared leadership" behaviors increase newcomer motivation and participation along multiple dimensions, but may adversely affect experienced participant motivation and participation.

This study will contribute a comparative analysis of requester-volunteer interactions in a sample of citizen science projects from within the Zooniverse platform. Building on literature on crowd work, citizen science, and studies of effective leadership in online communities and peer production, we construct models to test whether shared leadership behaviors lead to enhanced citizen scientist engagement.

Analytic approach:

Use observational data drawn from Zooniverse database records to build variables and multilevel models that test whether science team member behaviors and science team - volunteer interactions consistent with shared leadership predict increased volunteer engagement and higher quality contributions.

Dependent variables (all nested within projects):


 * Count of volunteer contributions
 * Median/total quality of contributions (using gold-standard data where available)
 * Volunteer survival rate: time on zooniverse platform, completed project (0/1)
 * Number of active volunteers throughout project?
 * Risk of highly negative interactions between volunteers and science team members (if we can identify these)
 * from my observations I have yet to find these.
 * these seems like an independent, not a dependent variable