Patterns of Participation and Motivation in Folding@home: The Contribution of Hardware Enthusiasts and Overclockers

Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which participants run protein folding simulations on their computers. Participants complete work units and are awarded points for their contribution. An investigation into motivations to participate and patterns of participation revealed the significant contribution of a sub-community composed of individuals who custom-build computers to maximise their processing power. These individuals, known as “overclockers” or “hardware enthusiasts,” use distributed computing projects such as Folding@home to benchmark their modified computers and to compete with one another to see who can process the greatest number of project work units. Many are initially drawn to the project to learn about computer hardware from other overclockers and to compete for points. However, once they learn more about the scientific outputs of Folding@home, some participants become more motivated by the desire to contribute to scientific research. Overclockers form numerous online communities where members collaborate and help each other maximise their computing output. They invest heavily in their computers and process the majority of Folding@home’s simulations, thus providing an invaluable (and free) resource

Untapped: Accessing Extension to Strengthen Connections Between Citizen Science and Community Decision Making

Citizen science is on the rise, and Extension is poised to support this movement by offering technical assistance to citizen science programs, communities, federal partners, and researchers. The expansion of citizen science provides an opportunity for fostering innovative access to Extension resources and increasing engagement with new audiences. To encourage capitalization on this opportunity, we outline Extension\u27s traditional strengths and connect them to the needs of citizen science programs, offer examples of Extension-based citizen science programs that are working with communities to make natural resource management decisions, and make suggestions for ways in which Extension\u27s technical assistance can be shared with the citizen science community to build new partnerships

MarsCAPE: Mars Communicated through an Augmented, Physical Environment

In the last decade, vast amounts of planetary science data has been made available publicly often focused on Mars. Such data is typically disseminated via the web and made available through screen-based visualisations. However, this approach can make it difficult to convey the broader context of a feature of interest or the spatial arrangement of surface phenomena. To better support learning and engagement, we present and evaluate MarsCAPE: Mars Communicated through an Augmented, Physical Environment. MarsCAPE consists of physical models of the surface of Mars, augmented by projected information and visualizations. To assess its learning and engagement value, a structured workshop and formal evaluation were conducted. Participants reported a significant increase in knowledge, found the models engaging, and exhibited natural learning without prompting. Systems such as MarsCAPE have potential to provide an interesting, educational way for the public to access planetary data that goes beyond the capabilities of on-screen visualizations

Unleashing the Potential of Citizen Science as an Educational Tool towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Quality Education for an empowered society

This policy brief assesses the potential and challenges of citizen science (CS) as an educational tool and how it can contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While CS can address specifi c challenges across almost all of the 17 SDGs, this policy brief focuses on direct contributions to SDG 4 A, Quality Education, and asks: ‘How citizen science can equip learners with life-long skills, knowledge and attitudes that foster change-making, using a blend of non-traditional pedagogies?’ We demonstrate the roles that educational practices developed around citizen science can have by presenting a selection of inspiring initiatives currently taking place throughout Europe. Citizen science based education does not provide learners solely with an understanding of science and scientifi c methodology, but it also develops social skills used to communicate, take part in or coordinate multi-stakeholder projects. In this way, this policy brief aims to support decision makers in education and science policy, including the European Commission, national and state ministries and other stakeholders in integrating these non-traditional educational practices into existing funding schemes, education policy and curricula, towards more meaningful, transformative learning and teaching

Public Participation in Scientific Research: a Framework for Deliberate Design

Members of the public participate in scientific research in many different contexts, stemming from traditions as varied as participatory action research and citizen science. Particularly in conservation and natural resource management contexts, where research often addresses complex social–ecological questions, the emphasis on and nature of this participation can significantly affect both the way that projects are designed and the outcomes that projects achieve. We review and integrate recent work in these and other fields, which has converged such that we propose the term public participation in scientific research (PPSR) to discuss initiatives from diverse fields and traditions. We describe three predominant models of PPSR and call upon case studies suggesting that—regardless of the research context—project outcomes are influenced by (1) the degree of public participation in the research process and (2) the quality of public participation as negotiated during project design. To illustrate relationships between the quality of participation and outcomes, we offer a framework that considers how scientific and public interests are negotiated for project design toward multiple, integrated goals. We suggest that this framework and models, used in tandem, can support deliberate design of PPSR efforts that will enhance their outcomes for scientific research, individual participants, and social–ecological systems

Implementing an Environmental Citizen Science Project: Strategies and Concerns from Educators’ Perspectives

Citizen science seems to have a natural alignment with environmental and science education, but incorporating citizen science projects into education practices is still a challenge for educators from different education contexts. Based on participant observation and interview data, this paper describes the strategies educators identified for implementing an environmental citizen science project in different education contexts (i.e., classroom teaching, aquarium exhibits, and summer camp) and discusses the practical concerns influencing independent implementation by educators. The results revealed different implementation strategies that are shaped by four categories of constraints: 1) organizational and institutional policies, 2) educators’ time and material resources, 3) learners’ needs and abilities, and 4) aspects of citizen science project design that constitute a higher barrier to entry for educators managing student contributions. We developed a simple two-dimensional model to demonstrate the types of adaptations that educators made to citizen science projects and discussed the potential role of persuasive technologies to address some of the gaps and better facilitate educator and learner participation

Innovations in Camera Trapping Technology and Approaches: The Integration of Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence

Camera trapping has become an increasingly reliable and mainstream tool for surveying a diversity of wildlife species. Concurrent with this has been an increasing effort to involve the wider public in the research process, in an approach known as ‘citizen science’. To date, millions of people have contributed to research across a wide variety of disciplines as a result. Although their value for public engagement was recognised early on, camera traps were initially ill‐suited for citizen science. As camera trap technology has evolved, cameras have become more user‐friendly and the enormous quantities of data they now collect has led researchers to seek assistance in classifying footage. This has now made camera trap research a prime candidate for citizen science, as reflected by the large number of camera trap projects now integrating public participation. Researchers are also turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist with classification of footage. Although this rapidly‐advancing field is already proving a useful tool, accuracy is variable and AI does not provide the social and engagement benefits associated with citizen science approaches. We propose, as a solution, more efforts to combine citizen science with AI to improve classification accuracy and efficiency while maintaining public involvement

Enhancing Participation Through Inquiry Learning and Citizen Science: Science for Everyone

Volunteers in citizen science projects contribute their labour to the activities of science, becoming involved in the advancement of science. With the advent of digital technologies, the involvement of non-scientists in scientific projects has mushroomed (see Curtis et al., 2018). However, the nature of the participation in citizen science has been limited in a variety of ways. We have adopted the term citizen inquiry to describe our approach. Our interest in inquiry learning was developed in the Personal Inquiry project (see Sharples et al., 2015) which developed an approach to supporting inquiries of personal relevance in science learning. We developed software to support pupils, our first iteration of the nQuire platform. Further projects explored ways in which such software could be of use in encouraging participation in citizen science inquiry. We designed the later iterations of the nQuire platform (nquire.org.uk) as a citizen science and inquiry learning tool, that can support any individual or organisation (with or without research background) to set up and manage their own scientific investigations. We report here on the impact of this work over a fifteen-year period. We discuss the ways in which this software has allowed enhanced participation in citizen projects and the potential development of this approach for democratising citizen science

Instagram of Rivers: Facilitating Distributed Collaboration in Hyperlocal Citizen Science

Citizen science project leaders collecting field data in a hyperlocal community often face common socio-technical challenges, which can potentially be addressed by sharing innovations across different groups through peer-to-peer collaboration. However, most citizen science groups practice in isolation, and end up re-inventing the wheel when it comes to addressing these common challenges. This study seeks to investigate distributed collaboration between different water monitoring citizen science groups. We discovered a unique social network application called Water Reporter that mediated distributed collaboration by creating more visibility and transparency between groups using the app. We interviewed 8 citizen science project leaders who were users of this app, and 6 other citizen science project leaders to understand how distributed collaboration mediated by this app differed from collaborative practices of Non Water Reporter users. We found that distributed collaboration was an important goal for both user groups, however, the tasks that support these collaboration activities differed for the two user groups