In recent years there has been a growing interest toward the application of Web-based citizen science platforms. Such platforms use crowdsourcing techniques to support scientific advancements, and in several cases, have lead to new scientific discoveries which were not originally considered. Our work explores the highly successful Web-based citizen science platform, Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing platform with a userbase of over 1 million participants who volunteer their free time to support scientific enquiries. We focus on the growth of the Zooniverse platform, which has evolved from a rudimentary crowdsourcing platform where users were presented with tasks, into a platform which has become a rich community of citizen scientists, discussion, and interaction. Building upon existing research into the motivations and design considerations of developing and sustaining citizen science projects, this paper explores the space of citizen science engagement within the Zooniverse, and ask the question of whether citizen science has become a worldwide activity

Hall, Wendy

Luczak-Roesch, Markus

Simperl, Elena

Tinati, Ramine

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

Exploring the Global Adoption of Citizen ScienceRamine TinatiUniversity of SouthamptonWeb and Internet Sciencer.tinati@ecs.soton.ac.ukMarkus Luczak-RoeschUniversity of SouthamptonWeb and Internet Sciencemlr1m12@soton.ac.ukElena SimperlUniversity of SouthamptonWeb and Internet Scienceelena.simperl@soton.ac.ukWendy HallUniversity of SouthamptonWeb and Internet Sciencewh@soton.ac.ukABSTRACTIn recent years there has been a growing interest toward the appli-cation of Web-based citizen science platforms. Such platforms usecrowdsourcing techniques to support scientific advancements, andin several cases, have lead to new scientific discoveries which werenot originally considered. Our work explores the highly successfulWeb-based citizen science platform, Zooniverse, a crowdsourcingplatform with a userbase of over 1 million participants who volun-teer their free time to support scientific enquiries. We focus on thegrowth of the Zooniverse platform, which has evolved from a rudi-mentary crowdsourcing platform where users were presented withtasks, into a platform which has become a rich community of cit-izen scientists, discussion, and interaction. Building upon existingresearch into the motivations and design considerations of devel-oping and sustaining citizen science projects, this paper exploresthe space of citizen science engagement within the Zooniverse, andask the question of whether citizen science has become a world-wide activity.1. INTRODUCTIONIn recent years, advances in science has greatly benefited from thegrowing interest and engagement with crowdsourcing platforms.This growth in so called citizen science platforms have managedto successfully attract and engaged millions of unpaid volunteers,to spend their time, answering science-related tasks, such as theclassification of objects within millions of images, or the transcrip-tion of ancient manuscripts and logs. Expanding from the earlycitizen science astronomy-related projects, scientists from multipledomains and disciplines are now using crowdsourcing techniquesin order to support and advance their areas of research. Conse-quently, projects, such as the Zooniverse, are developing platformsto support an eco-system of projects, which provides volunteerswith a broad range of projects to engage with.Moreover, citizen science as an activity has evolved, platforms suchas the Zooniverse have grown from a solo activity where the entireuser workflow would consist of answering the pre-defined set ofquestions or tasks, to an environment where volunteers discuss, andcollaborate about their observations, and – often serendipitously –discover new scientific knowledge.However, whilst citizen science has shown to help various domains,project success is not guaranteed, which has been the driver to sev-eral studies of citizen science participation, from exploring theirmotivations, to modelling their behaviour to reduce churn whilstincreasing accuracy [14]. This has also led to the analysis andreview of citizen science design and development, with researchdocumenting the design processes, and principles of building thesespecial kinds of crowdsourcing platforms [16].Building on the literature concerning citizen science, our work ex-plores the space of understanding the adoption of citizen scienceas a global activity. We wish to understand how citizen scienceis perceived beyond the cultural borders of the western world, andsee if the uptake of such an activity is a global phenomenon, orsomething that is biased towards societies that are more familiarto an ethos of volunteering. In this paper we discuss our previ-ous work conducted on citizen science motivations and design, andthen present preliminary findings related to the adoption of citizenscience as a worldwide activity. We then consider these findings interms of the wider cultural and societal nuances that may influenceadoption.2. RELATED WORKOnline citizen science systems have typically enlisted the help ofparticipants with three kinds of activities: data collection/curation(e.g., [19]); data analysis (e.g. [17, 6]); and problem-solving (e.g.,[8, 2]). The Zooniverse [5] fits the second category; small profes-sional science teams, who provide the raw digital artefacts for eachproject, such as images, video and audio recordings, are supportedby vast numbers of members participants who voluntarily identify,classify, and label the data according to instructions and loose di-rection provided by the science teams.Previous work has studied a variety of different aspects of citizenscience systems. Analysis of the factors that most influence ac-curacy and completion of tasks, as well as methods for improvingsuch performance such as through refined task selection have beenstudied [1, 7], as well as task scheduling heuristics [8]. Wiggenset al. [18] analysed CS projects as online communities and mod-elled CS community organisation through the relationship betweenvolunteering, digital technologies, and workplaces. Other studieshave sought to understand the core motivations of citizen scien-tists (e.g. [11, 12]), while others have focused on documenting theincreasingly common citizen-initiated serendipitous scientific dis-coveries [13]. Such studies often reference the vast psychologyand social psychology literature relating to human motivation toprovide a theoretical grounding for continued engagement with CSsystems [4].2.1 Summary of Previous WorkIn summary, our previous work has explored several areas of inter-est within the Zooniverse and other citizen science platforms. Wehave explored motivations of citizen scientists and their behaviourcharacteristics [14], as well as a detail analysis of the discussionand collaborative activity between citizen scientists, and how thisresults in the discovery of unknown scientific finding [10]. Theuse of gamification as a mechanism for citizen science design wasalso investigated, specifically looking at how certain features can beused to improve user retention and engagement [15]. Drawing uponthese findings, and more widely within the field of online commu-nity research, a design framework for citizen science projects wasdeveloped, which describes the various social and technical fea-tures which may improve the chances of launching a successfulcitizen science project [16].3. DATA AND RESULTS3.1 DatasetOur study draws upon 5 months of data from the Zooniverse plat-form collected between May to September 2015. which contains7, 746, 840 classification and 120, 009 talk records, from 61, 833users. The classification and talk records contain various fields ofinformation about the logged in user, including their identifier, thetimestamp, project and item they were working on, and the messagetext if they were posting on the messaging forum. Classificationsalso contain the geographic location of the logged in user, which isgiven by a latitude and longitude coordinates of where the classifi-cation was performed.3.2 ResultsWe conducted a series of descriptive statistical tests on the datasetwhich provided us with a macro-level perspective of the volunteersengaging within the task feature, and also within the talk integratedtalk forums within Zooniverse. As Table 3.2 shows, a significantproportion of the total number of classifications were conducted bymembers identified as being located in Europe or North America,cumulatively accounting for 88% of the total number of classifica-tions.Table 3.2 provides a list of the top 10 languages identified withineither the task or talk records (corresponding the preferred UI lan-guage, or the body of the message published in the forum). Asshown, English accounted for 86.3% of the total entries, whichcorresponds to the previous analysis of where Zooniverse users aregeographically located.4. DISCUSSIONIn existing studies of citizen science, or more broadly in onlinecommunities research, the analysis of user participation and en-gagement have often asked questions about why people take part.Studies are often framed by motivational frameworks, surveys andqualitative studies, seek to answer questions about the intrinsic andextrinsic desires of people willing to contribute (either for free orfor paid). Findings often reveal a series of motivating factors whichcan more than often be synthesised down to a set of basic humanneeds; altruism, power, money, love, or a sense of self-belonging [9].Region ClassificationsEurope (UK, Germany, France) 3688453 (48.2%)North America (USA, Canada, Mexico) 3071134 (40.2%)Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania) 347818 (4.6%)Asia (Singapore, India, Japan) 277536 (3.6%)Far East 37278 (0.5%)Middle East 15318 (0.2%)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile) 154807 (2.0%)Africa (South Africa, Egypt, Kenya) 50045 (0.7%)Table 1: Classifications made aggregated by geographical re-gion (Asia count is a cumulative value which includes the FarEast and Middle East). For each region and the correspondingtop 3 contributing countries are listedLanguage Users (%)English 86.3French 3.3German 2.1Spanish 1.4Polish 1.0Chuvash 1.0Czech 1.0Russian 0.9Dutch 0.8Italian 0.7Table 2: Top 10 identified languages of users for talk or taskactivity. Language for the task entry is based on the preferredlanguage of the UI, chosen by the user. In total 38 languageswere identifiedHowever, as the initial analysis has shown, there is a significantproportion of the world that are not taking part in these activities.The preliminary findings raise several questions to both the design-ers of citizen science platform, and those interested in understand-ing citizen science as a new form of Web activity. For a citizen sci-ence platform design and community manager, these findings havemultiple implications from the projects design, interface, features,and languages available, to the domain (e.g. nature, or Astronomy)of the project. Furthermore, if citizen science aims to become aglobally accessible and successful activity, then understanding thereasons for why specific regions are not engaged, is required.The results suggest that the Zooniverse platform has managed toengaged significantly within the Western world, and is predomi-nately driven by an English speaking community. However, whilstcontaining over half of the worlds population, countries within re-gions such as Asian and Africa contribute to a very small propor-tion of the contributions made. Intuitively, there are several soci-etal and economic factors that limit the participation of people fromcountries within these regions, however there are several countrieswithin these regions which are in the socio-economic position tocontribute.In a bid to answer such questions, and unpack the external factorsaffect the level participation observed, our future work will turn to-wards the social sciences to explore the role of cultural norms andpractises, with specific interest in the concept of volunteering andits acceptance within society [3]. We will draw upon theories ofwork and volunteering culture in order to understand the deeperreasons for why participant is lower in such areas, and what mech-anisms, social and technical, can be employed by citizen sciencedevelopers to improve engagement.5. REFERENCES[1] Cooper, C. 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