A model

This diagram represent the influences on projects at iNat, based on the previous discussion.

Updated on 8. August 2016 to reflect new data from the following article:
[1] Andrea Wiggins and Yurong He. 2016. Community-based Data Validation Practices in Citizen Science. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1548-1559. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2820063
Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2820063 (accessed 9. August 2016)

Posted on July 16, 2016 10:35 PM by alvarosaurus alvarosaurus

Comments

Again, this is really great stuff... Attaching a few folks that should look at this:
@kueda @loarie @carrieseltzer @cullen

Posted by sambiology over 7 years ago

Thanks for tagging, Sam! @alvarosaurus I love your thinking around this. Just yesterday I imagined my own concentric circles diagram for iNaturalist from a conversation here about citizen science, but yours is much more thorough! Mine is pretty lame in comparison but I just sketched it up here. I love that iNat has the potential to engage ANYONE because biodiversity can be found anywhere humans are, but it's also incredible that it can also support more narrowly focused projects (which I'd prefer to see rather than platform proliferation). I still think iNaturalist has untapped potential to better support other projects and I think it's an area for future growth. I like the way you broke out and diagramed the different parts!

Posted by carrieseltzer over 7 years ago

I love to read your comments and I encourage you to point out things I have missed. I'm sure there's much more to iNat than is on this diagram. Next I will try to do some statistics to prove/disprove the connections in the diagram, starting from "a tight taxonomic scope leads to more research grade observations". Thanks for tagging and commenting.

Posted by alvarosaurus over 7 years ago

This is great! It's a complex space and I can think of a few other things I might add myself (I developed a similar but completely different model in my dissertation), but you've really captured a lot in this.

So just to add a few ideas to the discussion... I think there may also a knowledge-building component around how the platform works and norms of participation along the lines of onboarding/orientation to an organization in other spaces. A somewhat related aspect is how people represent their expertise within their profiles, which is also often reflective of community norms. Together these things speak to less obvious aspects of socialization/behavior change/learning/putting existing expertise to work, e.g. as individual-level goals that impact projects (some of these are also project-level goals, though!)

One of the other aspects of the community that I really want to dig into from a research standpoint is the emergence of informal self-assigned roles, for example, sometimes a person will act as the unofficial "welcome wagon" and that type of interaction usually improves retention (initial experiences of individuals have high impact on community development). Others might take the role of networker, like tagging the right experts to help ID an obs for a newcomer until they figure out how to find those people themselves. I'm sure there are other emergent roles but we'd have to dig them out from data that we don't have yet. Even more interesting would be learning how projects use the available information about individuals' participation to recruit people into more formal roles like curators. And also if there are any other specialized roles for which targeted permissions or functionality would improve their ability to contribute. I think this is important because intellectual diversity is valuable in a space like this, and if we better understood who chooses to do which work and what it contributes to the bottom line, we could set expectations better where needed and foster development of certain parts of the community where it would have a bigger impact.

And in terms of factors that could promote adoption by even broader demographics and user groups (like classrooms) the data-out components are really important---particularly visual representations of project data and analyses of them. There are some features that work for that, but further expansion of that functionality could be valuable.

Occasionally I also wonder about temporal elements, such as when to choose one-off versus ongoing versus punctuated project designs and how to roll them out so that they achieve the intended goals. One-off isn't going to work as well without robust promotion; ongoing and punctuated won't work as well without robust feedback cycles and visual summaries. Another big question to me is how to get the newbies who sign up for a one-off project to come back, but that's a much more complex challenge!

Posted by anikarenina over 7 years ago

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