Author
Nathan Prestopnik
Kevin Crowston
Keywords
motivation
Design
Citizen Science
data quality
Design Science
Games
Gaming
Participation
Social Computational Systems
Abstract

In this paper, an ongoing design research project is described. Citizen Sort, currently under development, is a web-based social-computational system designed to support a citizen science task, the taxonomic classification of various insect, animal, and plant species. In addition to supporting this natural science objective, the Citizen Sort platform will also support information science research goals on the nature of motivation for social-computation and citizen science. In particular, this research program addresses the use of games to motivate participation in social-computational citizen science, and explores the effects of system design on motivation and data quality. A design science approach, where IT artifacts are developed to solve problems and answer research questions is described. Research questions, progress on Citizen Sort planning and implementation, and key challenges are discussed.
Year of Publication
2011
Conference Name
“Computing for Citizen Science” workshop at the IEEE eScience Conference
Date Published
12/2011
Conference Location
Stockholm, Sweden
URL
http://itee.uq.edu.au/ eresearch/workshops/compcitsci2011/index.html
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