Abstract
Involving the public in scientific discovery offers opportunities for engagement, learning, participation, and action. Since its launch in 2007, the CitSci.org platform has supported hundreds of community-driven citizen science projects involving thousands of participants who have generated close to a million scientific measurements around the world. Members using CitSci.org follow their curiosities and concerns to develop, lead, or simply participate in research projects. While professional scientists are trained to make ethical determinations related to the collection of, access to, and use of information, citizen scientists and practitioners may be less aware of such issues and more likely to become involved in ethical dilemmas. In this era of big and open data, where data sharing is encouraged and open science is promoted, privacy and openness considerations can often be overlooked. Platforms that support the collection, use, and sharing of data and personal information need to consider their responsibility to protect the rights to and ownership of data, the provision of protection options for data and members, and at the same time provide options for openness. This requires critically considering both intended and unintended consequences of the use of platforms, data, and volunteer information. Here, we use our journey developing CitSci.org to argue that incorporating customization into platforms through flexible design options for project managers shifts the decision-making from top-down to bottom-up and allows project design to be more responsive to goals. To protect both people and data, we developed—and continue to improve—options that support various levels of “open” and “closed” access permissions for data and membership participation. These options support diverse governance styles that are responsive to data uses, traditional and indigenous knowledge sensitivities, intellectual property rights, personally identifiable information concerns, volunteer preferences, and sensitive data protections. We present a typology for citizen science openness choices, their ethical considerations, and strategies that we are actively putting into practice to expand privacy options and governance models based on the unique needs of individual projects using our platform.
Highlights
People have been collecting and interpreting observations of the natural world for millennia (Miller-Rushing et al 2012) and have had to decide who participates, what they observe, and how to manage the resulting information in ways that respect norms, access, sharing, privacy, and ownership (Bernholz and Ormond-Parker 2018)
This paper covers the difficult intersection of theory and practice: How do we develop a platform that will succeed in both moving citizen science forward to meet underlying ethical requirements of all of our teams—and of science— while helping the greatest number of projects possible to do great science? What ethically must be protected and what must be made available? Who is in the driver’s seat? By contributing to the discourse of citizen science theory and practice, we hope to demonstrate our commitment to transparency by recognizing that our platform is not yet what we aspire it to be
Assuming that legal and regulatory laws and policies are being followed, we suggest answering these questions during the project planning and design stages: 1) Which personal information is necessary to collect, 2) What should the default settings for sharing personal information be, and 3) What personal information sharing choices should be put into the hands of the volunteer? We find the most parsimonious solutions are those that focus on collecting only personal information necessary to ensure quality and integrity of the project and volunteer management; and on giving volunteers governance to choose how they are identified within the project and which data are shared, with whom, and when
Summary
People have been collecting and interpreting observations of the natural world for millennia (Miller-Rushing et al 2012) and have had to decide who participates, what they observe, and how to manage the resulting information in ways that respect norms, access, sharing, privacy, and ownership (Bernholz and Ormond-Parker 2018). These roles can involve setting the research agenda; articulating project governance structures; selecting protocols; collecting, analyzing, visualizing, interpreting, archiving and sharing data; informing decision makers; contributing code to applications; making instrumentation useful for projects (as in makerspaces); changing individual behaviors; and sharing results via social media, to name a few Given this breadth of ways in which people participate in citizen science, and the roles they can take on, our team set out on an adventure to develop CitSci.org to accommodate diverse questions and topics, and multiple governance approaches and data access needs. By putting the selection of membership and data openness into the hands of our users, we are both creating a platform that meets the needs of a diverse project base and giving governance over those decisions to our users In addition to these existing settings, we are currently developing tools to expand our sub-choices within the realm of partially open by providing “open-close” toggles at different levels of the platform and at different levels of data representation. The same questions may be asked from a developer’s perspective when envisioning the user audience’s potential needs (Figure 5)
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