Abstract
This article examines how project leaders in complex citizen science projects ensure the quality of project outcomes given the challenges of involving citizens, whose knowledge is diverse and unknown beforehand. To this aim, a qualitative multiple-case study was carried out to compare the practices of five collaborative online citizen science projects in the humanities in which citizens transcribe, translate, and annotate handwritten manuscripts from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The choices made to access knowledge, thus to recruit participants either through open or targeted calls, seem to be fundamental for the different configurations of knowledge management activities that project leaders apply to ensure quality outcomes. Other factors influencing these knowledge management configurations are citizens’ proximity, knowledge characteristics, technology affordances, and the extent to which project leaders are aware of citizens’ backgrounds and skills. This study adds to earlier frameworks proposed to advise the design and management of citizen science projects. By taking a knowledge perspective, this article provides practical directions for project leaders involved in citizen science and highlights the need to put time and effort in managing knowledge processes.
Highlights
The phenomenon of online citizen science, defined as a participative way of running scientific research projects, in which researchers and citizens work together through the Internet primarily collecting, processing, and/or analysing data (Wiggins and Crowston 2011; Riesch and Potter 2014), has become a topic of research in itself
Research about citizen science has mainly focussed on two key areas of interest for project leaders: volunteer engagement and the quality of project outcomes. As this is a key concern for project leaders striving for high-quality project outcomes (Riesch and Potter 2014) that depend on volunteers
Quality is essential for the outcomes of citizen science, and earlier research has recommended keeping outcomes in mind when designing projects (Shirk et al 2012), but we still know little about how quality is ensured, especially in complex citizen science (Kittur et al 2013); the aim of this study is to understand how project leaders in complex citizen science ensure the quality of project outcomes
Summary
The phenomenon of online citizen science, defined as a participative way of running scientific research projects, in which researchers and citizens work together through the Internet primarily collecting, processing, and/or analysing data (Wiggins and Crowston 2011; Riesch and Potter 2014), has become a topic of research in itself. In many well-known citizen science projects, citizens usually perform straightforward tasks, such as classifying images based on predefined categories as in project Galaxy Zoo, or transcribing structured information like ships’ logbooks in Old Weather (Dunn and Hedges 2014; Ponciano and Brasileiro 2014; Mitchell, Crowston and Østerlund 2018). The quality of those types of tasks is mainly ensured by aggregating multiple contributions or comparing them with a gold standard (Brumfield 2012; Law et al 2017). Given the knowledge-intensity of complex tasks, the quality of their outcomes are usually difficult to evaluate (Alvesson 2001)
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