The growing interest in e-Government raises the question of how governments can increase citizen adoption and usage of their online government services. e-Government becomes especially important given its potential to reduce costs and improve service compared with alternative traditional modes. Citizen trust is proposed to be an important catalyst of e-Government adoption. By investigating onli...

Citizen scientists are playing an increasing role in helping collect, process, and/or analyze data used to study a variety of scientific phenomena. We address the problem of identifying tasks that are rewarding to the citizen scientists, which results in greater participation, leading to more data and better models. We apply our methodology to eBird, whose participants are avid birders interest...

In this paper we discuss the model of an environment, acting as a first-class entity for MAS Simulation. To illustrate, we use the DIVAs framework’s design and implementation details.

We investigate the development of scientific content knowledge of volunteers participating in online citizen science projects in the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org). We use econometric methods to test how measures of project participation relate to success in a science quiz, controlling for factors known to correlate with scientific knowledge. Citizen scientists believe they are learning about ...

Environmental volunteering and environmental citizen science projects both have a pivotal role in civic participation. However, one of the common challenges is recruiting and retaining an adequate level of participant engagement to ensure the sustainability of these projects. Thus, understanding patterns of participation is fundamental to both types of projects. This study uses and builds on ex...

The majority of volunteers participating in citizen science projects perform only a few tasks each before leaving the system. We designed an intervention strategy to reduce disengagement in 16 different citizen science projects. Targeted users who had left the system received emails that directly addressed motivational factors that affect their engagement. Results show that participants receivi...

The last years, citizen science, or crowd science, has increased tremendously, both in number of projects, and number of participants. Most literature on crowd science focuses on its advantages, for both scientists, and the participating citizens. The challenges of crowd science come mainly from limited organizational capacity of some of these projects. As a result of this line of reasoning, th...

Comparative genomics is a field of research that aims to provide us accurate mappings between the genetic material of multiple species. These techniques are useful for biomedical research and evolutionary studies. We present Phylo and Open-Phylo, an open citizen science platform and human computing-game for comparative genomic studies that reached more than 300,000 users.

The engagement of volunteers on Citizen Science platforms can considerably be influenced by an intuitive and motivating user interface. This thesis elaborates on a design approach for collaborative Citizen Science platforms that involve their contributors during multiple stages of the scientific research process. The approach provides design concepts, which ensure a good user experience and the...