Crowdsourcing for science : understanding and enhancing

INTRODUCTION Recent years have seen an increase in the number of citizen science initiatives, which harness the contribution from large numbers of volunteers to support a scientific project, much like other internet-based crowdsourcing applications. In some cases, citizen science projects are based on volunteer computing, where people contribute their computer resources to the project (rather than contributing their manual effort). The most notable example of these projects is SETI@home, where contributors allocate their personal computing resources to be used for detecting intelligent life outside Earth. Other citizen science initiatives, on the other hand, rely on the manual effort of contributors, for example Galaxy Zoo, a web-based distributed analysis project where contributors classify images of galaxies, or the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) where volunteers monitor the environment and contribute weather data. Common to all these initiatives is the use of the internet as the primary platform for enabling distributed, volunteered, citizen science contribution. These initiatives represent a paradigm shift in scientific research, reducing substantially operating costs and increasing the involvement of the general public. We term this new breed of internet-based citizen science ‘Science Sourcing’, or simply ‘SciSourcing’. In this workshop position paper we briefly review the field, identify gaps in the current literature, introduce our own research program in this area, and describe preliminary results from two recent empirical studies.