John Darlington

Poonam Yadav, John Darlington

In recent years, citizen science has grown in popularity due to a number of reasons, including the emphasis on informal learning and creativity potential associated with these initiatives. Citizen science projects address research questions from various domains, ranging from Ecology to Astronomy. Due to the advancement of communication technologies, which makes outreach and engagement of wider communities easier, scientists are keen to turn their own research into citizen science projects. However, the development, deployment and management of these projects remains challenging. One of the most important challenges is building the project itself. There is no single tool or framework, which guides the step-by-step development of the project, since every project has specific characteristics, such as geographical constraints or volunteers' mode of participation. Therefore, in this article, we present a series of conceptual frameworks for categorisation, decision and deployment, which guide a citizen science project creator in every step of creating a new project starting from the research question to project deployment. The frameworks are designed with consideration to the properties of already existing citizen science projects and could be easily extended to include other dimensions, which are not currently perceived.

Poonam Yadav, John Darlington

Online Citizen Science platforms are good examples of socio-technical systems where technology-enabled interactions occur between scientists and the general public (volunteers). Citizen Science platforms usually host multiple Citizen Science projects, and allow volunteers to choose the ones to participate in. Recent work in the area has demonstrated a positive feedback loop between participation and learning and creativity in Citizen Science projects, which is one of the motivating factors both for scientists and the volunteers. This emphasises the importance of creating successful Citizen Science platforms, which support this feedback process, and enable enhanced learning and creativity to occur through knowledge sharing and diverse participation. In this paper, we discuss how scientists' and volunteers' motivation and participation influence the design of Citizen Science platforms. We present our summary as guidelines for designing these platforms as user-inspired socio-technical systems. We also present the case-studies on popular Citizen Science platforms, including our own CitizenGrid platform, developed as part of the CCL EU project, as well as Zooniverse, World Community Grid, CrowdCrafting and EpiCollect+ to see how closely these platforms follow our proposed guidelines and how these may be further improved to incorporate the creativity enabled by the collective knowledge sharing.

Jeremy Cohen, Chris Cantwell, Neil Chue Hong et al.

Developing software to undertake complex, compute-intensive scientific processes requires a challenging combination of both specialist domain knowledge and software development skills to convert this knowledge into efficient code. As computational platforms become increasingly heterogeneous and newer types of platform such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing become more widely accepted for HPC computations, scientists require more support from computer scientists and resource providers to develop efficient code and make optimal use of the resources available to them. As part of the libhpc stage 1 and 2 projects we are developing a framework to provide a richer means of job specification and efficient execution of complex scientific software on heterogeneous infrastructure. The use of such frameworks has implications for the sustainability of scientific software. In this paper we set out our developing understanding of these challenges based on work carried out in the libhpc project.