CSCW Principles to Support Citizen Science
This work addresses the challenge of democratizing science through citizen science, but it is incremental as it applies existing CSCW knowledge to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of developing infrastructure for citizen science by applying principles from computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research, using a nine-step framework to identify contributions.
Citizen science changes the way scientific research is pursued. It opens up data collection and analysis to the general public, to the wisdom of crowds. In this emerging area, there is much research to be done to better understand how we can develop citizen science infrastructure and continue the democratization of science. In creating such systems, there is much we can learn from principles that have emerged out of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research. In this paper, I use a nine-step framework to highlight where CSCW knowledge can contribute.