Competing or aiming to be average?: Normification as a means of engaging digital volunteers

Engagement, motivation and active contribution by digital volunteers are key requirements for crowdsourcing and citizen science projects. Many systems use competitive elements, for example point scoring and leaderboards, to achieve these ends. However, while competition may motivate some people, it can have a neutral or demotivating effect on others. In this paper we explore theories of personal and social norms and investigate normification as an alternative approach to engagement, to be used alongside or instead of competitive strategies. We provide a systematic review of existing crowdsourcing and citizen science literature and categorise the ways that theories of norms have been incorporated to date. We then present qualitative interview data from a pro-environmental crowdsourcing study, Close the Door, which reveals normalising attitudes in certain participants. We assess how this links with competitive behaviour and participant performance. Based on our findings and analysis of norm theories, we consider the implications for designers wishing to use normification as an engagement strategy in crowdsourcing and citizen science systems

Co-production for innovation: the urban living lab experience

Urban Living Labs (ULLs) are public spaces where local authorities engage citizens to develop innovative urban services. Their strength and popularity stem from a methodology based on open innovation, experimentation, and citizen engagement. Although the ULL methodology is supposed to largely adopt a co-production approach, connections between the two have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The paper seeks to fill this gap by examining through a qualitative analysis three experiences of ULLs made in Amsterdam, Boston and Turin. Specifically, the paper aims to assess whether ULLs can be really conceptualised as a form of co-production and, if so, which elements characterised them as innovative in comparison to \u2018mainstreaming\u2019 co-production; Then it analyses benefits and drawbacks related to their implementation

Beyond the grassroots: Two trajectories of "citizen sciencization" in environmental governance

Grassroots, bottom-up citizen science is a burgeoning form of public engagement with science, in which citizens mobilize scientific data to address local and global concerns. Contrary to top-down citizen science projects in which citizens collect data for experts, these grassroots initiatives typically unfold in do-it-ourselves fashion, thereby challenging formally-sanctioned, expert-centric citizen science approaches. This article illustrates these points through a comparative analysis of two potentially paradigmatic sites for environmental grassroots citizen science: Safecast (radiation pollution; Japan) and CuriousNoses (air pollution; Flanders, Belgium). These cases are selected on the basis of their anchors in local self-organized communities, with each case initiated by citizens instead of by formal institutions. Adopting a relational account of these sites as being shaped through both top-down and bottom-up imperatives, we draw out key features (defining moments, key actors, discourses, devices) in the constitution of these networks as credible, potentially influential actors in affairs of environmental governance. We introduce the notion of “citizen sciencization” as a way of understanding and exploring these processes against the backdrop of changing science-society relationships in Japan and Europe.H2020-MSCA-IF-2018 (Grant No. 836989); Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI (Grant No. 16K21476

The motivations, enablers and barriers for voluntary participation in an online crowdsourcing platform

This paper examines the phenomena of online crowdsourcing from the perspectives of both volunteers and the campaign coordinator of Tomnod – an online mapping project that uses crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images. A mixed-methods approach was used to study the enablers and barriers to participation, taking into consideration the whole spectrum of volunteers. The results show broad diversity in online volunteers, both in their demographics and the factors affecting their voluntary participation. The majority are older than 50 years and many – particularly the most active volunteers – have disabilities or long term health problems. The personal circumstances of participants are highlighted as a major factor affecting involvement in campaigns. Like many other platforms, altruism is a key motivator, yet many participants are more interested in the quality of their data and the impact it has on the ground. For many participants of online crowdsourcing campaigns, their involvement is strongly linked to the level of contact they have with campaign coordinators, both in the design of the platform and in providing feedback on the impact of their contributions

“Let’s pull these technologies out of the ivory tower”: The politics, ethos, and ironies of participant-driven genomic research

This paper investigates how groups of ‘citizen scientists’ in non-traditional settings and primarily online networks claim to be challenging conventional genomic research processes and norms. Although these groups are highly diverse, they all distinguish their efforts from traditional university- or industry-based genomic research as being ‘participant-driven’ in one way or another. Participant-driven genomic research (PDGR) groups often work from ‘labs’ that consist of servers and computing devices as much as wet lab apparatus, relying on information-processing software for data-driven, discovery-based analysis rather than hypothesis-driven experimentation. We interviewed individuals from a variety of efforts across the expanding ecosystem of PDGR, including academic groups, start-ups, activists, hobbyists, and hackers, in order to compare and contrast how they relate their stated objectives, practices, and political and moral stances to institutions of expert scientific knowledge production. Results reveal that these groups, despite their diversity, share commitments to promoting alternative modes of housing, conducting, and funding genomic research and, ultimately, sharing knowledge. In doing so, PDGR discourses challenge existing approaches to research governance as well, especially the regulation, ethics, and oversight of human genomic information management. Interestingly, the reaction of the traditional genomics research community to this revolutionary challenge has not been negative: in fact, the community seems to be embracing the ethos espoused by PDGR, at the highest levels of science policy. As conventional genomic research assimilates the ethos of PDGR, the movement’s ‘democratizing’ views on research governance are likely to become normalized as well, creating new tensions for science policy and research ethics