Srishti Gupta: Hello! My name is Srishti Gupta,
Srishti Gupta: and I will be presenting my research titled Instagram of Rivers facilitating distributed collaboration in hyperlocal citizen science, which was co-authored by Julia Gablonski, Chun-Hua Tsai, and John Carroll
Srishti Gupta: citizen science refers to participation of members of the public in scientific research. Citizen Science is a popular research technique in domains such as environmental science, where scientists usually need to collect large volumes of data which may not be feasible for a small research team.
Srishti Gupta: Therefore, citizen science not only helps scientists do better research by increasing the spatial and temporal breadth of data collection,
Srishti Gupta: but also helps engender socio technical award affordances, such as increased community knowledge about science and data, literacy, increased community engagement and social capital.
Srishti Gupta: However, citizen science groups often
Srishti Gupta: face common socio-technical challenges which have been repeatedly discussed in academic literature. Some of these challenges include uncertainty about citizen science data quality, retention of participants and projects and lack of appropriate technical infrastructure
Srishti Gupta: innovations that address these socio-technical challenges
Srishti Gupta: can be shared across different citizen science groups through peer-to-peer collaboration. However, most citizen science groups practice in isolation and end up reinventing the wheel when it comes to addressing these challenges,
Srishti Gupta: encouraging distributed, or peer-to-peer collaboration between citizen science groups and potentially streamline citizen science activities by ensuring that groups don't spend uneasy resources and time on addressing problems that can be otherwise easily be resolved by sharing and exchanging information and resources.
Srishti Gupta: The goal of this research was to understand. If facilitating distributed collaboration can help improve citizen science practices.
Srishti Gupta: For this we conducted a qualitative user study of a watershed networking application called water reporter.
Srishti Gupta: The goals of the study were to understand goals and benefits of distributed collaboration,
Srishti Gupta: and how appropriate technological infrastructure can support and improve distributed collaboration
Srishti Gupta: Water reporter is a citizen-size application that supports watershed monitoring activities. It has an instagram style of interface, and has some and some of the main functionalities of this app include data collection, which is done by uploading images and corresponding data form data, visualization, features and social interaction features where users can like and comment on the images.
Srishti Gupta: Water reporter was not built to support collaboration, but its social media design allows its users to appropriate its function to carry out collaborative activities. Hence we use this app to understand the possibility of technology mediated distributed collaboration to help improve citizen science practices.
Srishti Gupta: We used semi-structured interview protocol
Srishti Gupta: to interview project leaders of different citizen science water quality monitoring groups across the Us. We conducted fourteen interviews out of which eight were with water reporter users, and six were with non-water reporter users. This helped us compare how collaborative activities differed between groups using collaborative technology and groups that did not use any collaborative technology. We analyzed the interviews, using inductive thematic analysis.
Srishti Gupta: The data analysis led to four main findings, and I will be discussing two of these findings in this presentation
Srishti Gupta: goes of distributed collaboration.
Srishti Gupta: So all citizen science groups collaborate either regionally, nationally or both.
Srishti Gupta: So all groups had clear goals of collaboration, while both groups, while both user groups acknowledged the importance of distributed collaboration, more established groups find it easier to find new groups across the nation to partner with, whereas smaller or newer groups often focused on collaborating more regionally. Out of these smaller groups that used water reporter, they gave instances where the platform had helped them make connections that they wouldn't have considered or known otherwise
Srishti Gupta: in the court presented here. P5 is a member of a small citizen science group and a water reporter user in California, since most since most water reporter users are based on the east coast of the United States, P5 wouldn't have considered looking for collaborators in such a different geographic region,
Srishti Gupta: so unanticipated. These collaborations, facilitated by water reporter, transpired to be beneficial. On the other hand, non-water reporter users usually use their existing regional networks to collaborate and did not anticipate need for more distributed collaboration. In other geographic regions
Srishti Gupta: Social interactions among citizen scientists have been observed as an important motivational factor in online citizen science projects. And within field based science project our interviews elucidated the role of social interactions between distributed studies and science working in different groups,
Srishti Gupta: Since water reporter has been designed as a social media platform, its users could easily identify benefits and challenges of such social interactions,
Srishti Gupta: However interestingly, non-water reported users also alluded to the need to facilitate such distributed social interactions in the court presented here, P12 talks about an integrated database that her group was building with their partners and wanted to add a social interaction feature for volunteers to
Srishti Gupta: uh volunteers and different groups to communicate with each other.
Srishti Gupta: We discussed the role of water reporter as a mediator for distributed collaboration through the lens of activity theory.
Srishti Gupta: It is a mediator because it assists citizen scientists in various activities, such as data collection, interaction and data mapping
Srishti Gupta: these activities can be achieved without water reporter too
Srishti Gupta: however, having a mediator changes the process and outcomes of these activities.
Srishti Gupta: For instance, the observational data collected through the Instagram style. Interface changes the way data is collected
Srishti Gupta: and leads to additional socitechnical outcomes, such as greater transparency and interactions.
Srishti Gupta: Water reporter's Mediator design also creates visibility, allowing users to discover other groups and their work in the region. This accordance led to unintentional benefits which the groups weren't necessarily looking for, but the presence and use of the particular design features augmented their activities.
Srishti Gupta: Another implication was that this design was it the transparency provided by the tool
Srishti Gupta: for its users. The social media design allowed users to see and comprehend each other's activities as they occurred, so this can help create awareness and provide mutual knowledge and common ground to all collaborators In citizen science such awareness can be helpful in providing a sense of acknowledgment and sense of community by building the common realm and providing shared impact.
Srishti Gupta: As a way forward, we recommend implementing, implementing the design of for collaboratories or citizen science. Collaboratories refer to virtual labs, which was a design concept to enhance collaboration between distributed scientific teams.
Srishti Gupta: Hence we suggest exploring how concept of for collaboratories which has been successfully employed in the scientific community can be contrived to provide a similar collaborative environment to citizen scientists. A collaboratory for citizen science could be social media style design that allows easy data collection, database to directly parse and store data, social interactions, discussions, data, analysis and interpretation features.
Srishti Gupta: Even though skills and activities of professional scientists differ from citizen scientists, scientific collaboratories can be used as a model to guide the design of citizen science for collaboratories.
Srishti Gupta: Thank you. And if you have any further questions, you can reach me at this email.