Gaming for (Citizen) Science: Exploring Motivation and Data Quality in the Context of Crowdsourced Science through the Design and Evaluation of a Social-Computational System

Abstract

Citizen Sort, currently under development, is a web-based social-computational system designed to support a citizen science task, the taxonomic classification of various insect, animal, and plant species. In addition to supporting this natural science objective, the Citizen Sort platform will also support information science research goals on motivation for participation in social-computation and citizen science. In particular, this research program addresses the use of games to motivate participation in social-computational citizen science, and explores the effects of system design on motivation and data quality. A design science approach, where IT artifacts are developed to solve problems and answer research questions is described. Research questions, progress on Citizen Sort planning and implementation, and key challenges are discussed.