Shifting Roles of Citizen Scientists Accelerates High‐Quality Data Collection for Climate Change Research

Abstract

ABSTRACT We are a team of citizen science volunteers and academics presenting a case study about how long‐serving Old Weather ( OW ) project volunteers left the leading citizen science platform, Zooniverse.org , and created their own opensource transcription tool to capture meteorological data from historic ship logbooks, for climate science. This project, built in LibreOffice Calc (hereafter LOC‐OW ) marks a transition from a hierarchical model of crowdsourcing to a co‐productive model in which the roles of the volunteers and the original project owners shifted, the volunteers gained expertise and developed a sense of ownership over the data production tools and process.