CITIZEN SCIENCE FROM THE CITIZEN'S POINT OF VIEW

Science for Citizens (http://scienceforcitizens.net) soft-launched in January 2010 as a one-stop shop for citizen science and as an online community for science and nature enthusiasts. Our mission is to make it easier for would-be citizen scientists to connect with the researchers and the projects that need their help and to support science literacy and public engagement in science. By spring 2010, we were attracting 15,000 page views per month, and we now have the largest online database of such projects. We have been called “Science’s answer to Match.com” by The Scientist magazine. The site debuted at a time of expansion in the field of citizen science, as researchers, particularly in the geo-sciences, avail themselves of technological advances such as crowd-sourcing algorithms and GPS-enabled smartphones.

In this talk, we will describe the origin, goals, and progress of Science for Citizens. We will categorize and discuss the nature of the projects that seem popular among our audience of science enthusiasts. And we will present the results of surveys and interviews with our audience about their involvement in crowd-sourcing projects, including what they have learned and what makes a project successful from the citizen scientist’s point of view.