- This paper is, I'm Dan, on behalf of my contributors,
Ali Ghazinejad, Inna Kouper, and Hamid Ekbia,
we're all from Indiana University Bloomington.
A brief outline.
What I'm going to talk about is first I'm going
to introduce citizen science and then use the lens
of participatory design to drive a wedge
between two different kinds of citizen science projects
that are out there, and support that empirically.
And I'll finally draw conclusions about how the CHI
community is uniquely positioned to ameliorate
an asymmetry that we found in citizen science projects.
Citizen science is basically can be simply defined
as the participation of nonprofessional scientists
in research.
The big problem here is how you gauge participation.
And we use the lens of participatory design,
which I assume most of you are already familiar with.
Where briefly all stakeholders are allowed a voice
in conception and implementation of a project.
Now, participatory design is more familiar
to the CHI community, less so to the citizen science
and SDS community.
But three important differences that participatory design
sensitizes us to and this is what we're going to use
as a lens to look at citizen science projects is
a move from linear, rational sequences of subtasks
to iterative processes of reflection-in-action, that's one.
Two is a distinction between determinate
versus open-ended and more ambiguous
sociotechnical configurations.
And also a move from control to empowerment
of quote, unquote users.
I'm going to look at two map-making projects.
We get into this is more detail in the paper.
But I'm going to be really brief here.
Modern map-making until recently was limited
to an expert group of cartographers.
It was expensive, it had to use satellite imagery.
But now there are recent studies that show
that more amateur map-making can rival in terms of quality
the products of expert cartographers.
So we're looking here at two kinds of map-making projects,
two citizen science projects.
One is Cropland Capture.
It's very popular online.
It recruits citizens to improve the efficiency
of labor-intensive subtasks in map-making
because as it turns out, we really don't have
a good idea of the location of croplands
across the globe.
It's an instance of crowd science,
what we term in the paper crowd science,
because it puts citizens at the service of science.
Citizens are delegated to particular subtasks that are rote,
menial, and mostly repetitive.
We contrast that in the paper to a civic
map-making project called Kite Mapping
which promotes DIY map making and it is used
to contest official maps.
It uses technologies that are familiar, quite cheap,
like household items such as kites.
And they create these map-making devices via kites
by using kites and stitching them together
with camera phones so it's familiar and it's more appealing
to a broader socioeconomic base.
One instance they used this was in the case
of the BP oil spill of 2010 where they were able
to as I say here, contest official maps.
This is what we call civic science, which involves citizens
in the process of knowledge production,
scientific or otherwise.
Now you might think this is just an anecdote
because we're looking at only two
citizen science projects here.
We didn't think so and we did a coded and sample and coded
89 citizen science projects.
It turns out that for every four crowd science projects
there is out there, there is only one civic science project.
There are parallels here with participatory design
because as those of you who are familiar with
the history of participatory design know that it was
a rebellion sort of reaction against psychologistic
studies of users and their needs.
And instead argue that participation should be negotiated,
not psychologized, which is what we see happening
in a lot of citizen science projects.
Which brings up the question whether or not citizen science
is one step behind participatory design
and could learn anything from it.
There's been not a lot of cross-pollination
between citizen science and the CHI community.
One in particular, which is very revealing
for our purposes is the paper of 2014,
and there are several more like this.
The title itself is very revealing,
Designing for Dabblers and Deterring Drop-outs
in Citizen Science, where the author has basically
identified a problem in citizen science as a lack
of sustained contribution where citizens are dropping out.
Their diagnosis is that there is a lack of motivation.
And their solution is that we should gamefy platforms better
as a solution to this problem.
Now this is what we refer to in the paper
as a psychologization of the problem.
Again, using the lens of participatory design
one might ask whether motivation is a cause
or a consequence of the sociotechnical configuration?
So, in sum, we empirically establish an asymmetry
in citizen science.
We unpack the various dimensions of this asymmetry
using participatory design as a lens.
There are political, practical, technological,
and also theoretical implications for that.
And we argue that looking at the history
of participatory design can give us insights
as to how to rectify the asymmetry that we find
in citizen science.
Thank you, I tried to be as brief as I could.
(applause)
- [Audience Member] Hi, thanks very much for that.
I'm not one of the citizen science people,
so you might have to find another one.
I was wondering if you could maybe comment on
the work, sort of like Stacy's work which is
looking at everyday and amateur science and that HI
has done quite a lot of research on.
And where that kind of figures in this notion
of civic science, about whether or not you took
into account that kind of amateur, everyday science
that people are building sensors for people
to go and collect their own data?
- That's very good question.
That's a huge issue because it turns out it's really hard
to define citizen science since everyone
has their own definition.
It doesn't really help that there are various descriptors
like crowd science, civic, citizen, and crowd-sourced.
And there's tons of descriptions out there.
So what we relied, because we didn't want
to just be biased in doing this,
what we relied on was reputable sources
like from Scientific American, aggregate lists
of projects.
But the short answer to your question is there are
a couple of those out there,
and that's what we included as civic in our,
that's why I distinguished between science
and knowledge production because what you're talking about
is more comfortably situated in the knowledge
production realm as opposed to the narrower realm
of science.