Event slides (with links and QR codes) are available here.
Take a look at the event write-up on citizenscience.org here.
No matter where you are in your project’s lifecycle or whether your project is hosted on a custom or shared platform, this conversation with developers of project hosting platforms will give you insights, ideas, or inspiration for your project’s next steps.
One of the most significant decisions a project leader makes is where to host their project. While this decision may be driven by the nature of the your research questions and volunteer tasks, there are other considerations:
What existing community can each platform help you tap into? Will you need to recruit participants and/or train them online? How will you communicate with them - about in-project questions and results?
What data quality assurance, validation, and/or verification does your project require?
What other tools will you need to help your participant be successful - at your science task and at achieving their own motivating goals?
What other task support do you and your project need?
Learning about project hosting platforms to see what they support in terms of tasks and participant experience is time well spent. You may find a ready-made solution that saves you the expense and headache of developing and maintaining your own custom platform. You may find a new tool that you can use in the next phase of your project. At the least, you’ll see how others have created meaningful user experiences, collaboratively generated scientifically valuable data sets, and solved common challenges.
Join us - the Citizen Science Association and the NASA Cit Sci Leaders Series - on September 21 to hear from six commonly used web platforms hosting participatory science projects in North America: CitSci.org; Zooniverse; FieldScope; Anecdata; iNaturalist; and GLOBE Observer. While we will spend some time on platform updates and future plans, we will focus our program on a discussion of the kinds of research and participant experiences best supported by each. No matter where you are in your citizen science project’s life cycle, this conversation will help inspire your project’s next steps.
Speakers: