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

 * Read Best Practices Guide (all sections) for Zooniverse Project Builder.
 * Keep doing classifications to familiarize with projects.
 * Find a structured/methodical way to read a bunch of talk/forum interactions between Science Team members and volunteers.
 * Suggested projects included: GalaxyZoo2, PlanetHunters, Snapshot Serengeti, SpaceWarps.
 * Take notes about the kinds of interactions you observe with an eye towards which ones might embody different leadership/management practices and styles (start w. Zhu et al's "shared leadership" categories and build from there) that could lead to different volunteer behaviors.
 * reading and lit review from Zotero directory

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).
 * volunteer engagement
 * (shared) leadership
 * community management
 * citizen science
 * Kevin Crowston
 * Carsten Oesterlund
 * Andrea Wiggins
 * Rob Simpson
 * Chris Lintott (academic director of zooniverse)

Meeting logs
04-04-16: talked about predicted probabilities for unrelated projects; revised and updated work goals for next week. 03-29-16: laid out plans for the quarter; set some preliminary work goals.

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
 * Risk of highly negative interactions between volunteers and science team members (if we can identify these)