Abstract
An increasing number of Citizen Science (CS) projects rely on digital technologies for data collection and processing as well as for the coordination and communication between participants. However, these projects raise the question about whether the interplay between professional scientists and volunteers actually constitutes a collaborative working relationship in terms of shared goals, initiative and responsibility. A related question is about added values and benefits that volunteers gain by their participation. These issues have been studied with a sample of projects taken from the Zooniverse platform, particularly by analysing the communications found in the projects’ forum pages. Social network analysis techniques are used to identify structural characteristics underlying the forum interactions as basic measures that are repeated over time sequences to capture the dynamic changes. The results show that a smaller group of volunteer users is responsible for a large portion of communication and coordination actions, with some of them being promoted to moderators, which can be seen as a reward and incentive.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially funded by the European Union (EU) in the context of the CS Track project (Grant Agreement no. 872522) under the Horizon 2020 program. This document does not represent the opinion of the EU, and the EU is not responsible for any use that might be made of its content. We thank all CS Track team members for the fruitful collaboration.
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Krukowski, S., Amarasinghe, I., Gutiérrez-Páez, N.F., Hoppe, H.U. (2022). Does Volunteer Engagement Pay Off? An Analysis of User Participation in Online Citizen Science Projects. In: Wong, LH., Hayashi, Y., Collazos, C.A., Alvarez, C., Zurita, G., Baloian, N. (eds) Collaboration Technologies and Social Computing. CollabTech 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13632. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20218-6_5
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