Locating Citizen Science Activity

scistarter robotTitle: Locating Citizen Science Activity
Goal: Projects that ask citizens to make observations in the field need to communicate to potential participants just where they want people to collect that data. A project may want data only from a particular state or county, or watershed, or coastline; or it may want data from a particular type of site, such as a wooded area or urban area, but doesn’t care where that area is; or it may not make any difference where the data is collected as long as the data contains a geographic coordinate to locate it.

This hackfest group will put heads together to consider the range of possible geographic areas of interest that a project might have, from group members’ own experience and from browsing online citizen science portals like SciStarter, and how best to represent them. Are place names sufficient to describe most areas, or is it necessary to precisely draw out a project boundary on a map? Is there a common vocabulary that could be used to describe types of places? What kinds of user interfaces will help project owners quickly, simply, and accurately specify their project’s area(s) of interest? And what representations will enable citizens to check in with a project portal while “in the field”, and quickly discover whether there are any projects that would like them to contribute data from that very spot?

Why should you join this project? Having a simple, accurate representation of a project’s geographic area of interest is important not only for validating the contributed data, but also for finding and recruiting potential participants who live or visit the area of interest and may be able to contribute.

What skills are needed? Technical expertise, Enthusiasm, Ideas, UX/UI, digital mapping, GIS

What skills will this project’s organizer bring? ?Software design (UI, client, server) & coding (PHP, Javascript), database design & coding (MySQL, Mongo), basic media editing skills.

What materials will this project’s organizer bring? A laptop.

What other materials would be valuable? Laptop, Data from other projects, Candy, Datasets (if possible)

Project website: https://scistarter.com/

Contact: Steve Gano Steve@SciStarter.com

Twitter: @SciStarter

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