Abstract
The Anecdata website and its corresponding mobile app provide unique features to meet the needs of a wide variety of diverse citizen science projects from across the world. The platform has been developed with the help of continuous feedback from community partners, project leaders, and website users and currently hosts more than 200 projects. Over 8,000 registered users have contributed more than 30,000 images and over 50,000 observations since the platform became open to the public in 2014. From its inception, one of the core tenets of Anecdata’s mission has been to make data from citizen science projects freely accessible to project participants and the general public, and in the platform’s first few years, it followed a completely open data access model. As the platform has grown, hosting ever more projects, we have found that this model does not meet all project needs, especially where endangered species, property access rights, participant safety in the field, and personal privacy are concerned. We first introduced features for data and user privacy as part of “All About Arsenic,” a National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA)-funded project at MDI Biological Laboratory, which engages middle and high school teachers and students from schools across Maine and New Hampshire in sampling their home well water for analysis of arsenic and other heavy metals. In order to host this project on Anecdata, we developed features for spatial privacy or “geoprivacy” to conceal the coordinates of samplers’ homes, partial data redaction tools we call “private fields” to withhold certain sample registration questions from public datasets, and “participant anonymity” to conceal which user account uploaded an observation. We describe the impetus for the creation of these features, challenges we encountered, and our technical approach. While these features were originally developed for the purposes of a public health and science literacy project, they are now available to all project leaders setting up projects on Anecdata.org and have been adopted by a number of projects, including Mass Audubon’s Eastern Meadowlark Survey, South Carolina Aquarium’s SeaRise, and Coastal Signs of the Seasons (SOS) Monitoring projects.
Highlights
Citizen Science and Evolution of AnecdataCitizen science, or the involvement of citizens in scientific research, is an effective strategy for expanding capacity for science and fostering the use of science in decision-making about complex problems (Wals et al, 2014; Dillon et al, 2016)
“All About Arsenic”1 is the first project where we systematically developed three such features: (1) “geoprivacy,” so that sample site coordinates could be obscured; (2) “private fields,” so that certain data fields could be concealed from public view; and (3) “participant anonymity,” so that the identity of the person who originally registered a sample is not revealed
We recognize the role that technical platforms play in ensuring that citizen science projects are undertaken in responsible and ethical fashions that ensure privacy and/or anonymity of participants, permissions by participants for disclosure of data in private fields, and location privacy where necessary
Summary
Citizen Science and Evolution of AnecdataCitizen science, or the involvement of citizens in scientific research, is an effective strategy for expanding capacity for science and fostering the use of science in decision-making about complex problems (Wals et al, 2014; Dillon et al, 2016). Anecdata.org is an online platform developed at the MDI Biological Laboratory’s Community Environmental Health Lab for the collection of observational data from citizen scientists that is uniquely designed to enable project leaders and participants to utilize their data to enact change (Disney et al, 2017). The development of Anecdata started in 2014 to provide a data management system for several citizen science projects run by the Community Environmental Health Lab, ranging from bay monitoring to seagrass restoration. Anecdata evolved as an online platform for citizen science data collection, aggregation, and analysis through continuous feedback and suggestions from community partners who reached out to our team to host their projects. The development of the platform has followed an Agile software development methodology as defined in the Agile Manifesto, where features are developed by prioritizing and valuing “individuals and interactions over process and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiations, and responding to change over following a plan” (Hazzan and Dubinsky, 2014)
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