Nice to hear from you Miyoko!

To explain, first consider without SciStarter, project managers can see the activity patterns of volunteers only in their project. For example, project managers have often noted skew in participation in which a small percentage of volunteers are super-contributors and large percentage of volunteers contribute to smaller degrees. The observation of skew has framed how managers think about recruitment and retention and various trade-offs in project design. Now with SciStarter, project managers can see the activity patterns of volunteers beyond the scope of their project and into other events and projects. Information about how volunteers engage across the ecosystem of projects can help understand those skew patterns more broadly. Taking that further, some volunteers might engage in projects within one field (like birds) and others might cross disciplinary boundaries; some might engage only in the field, other online only, others both. There are a few ways this type of information might influence design and implementation of projects: 
For example, project managers might find research opportunities or collaborations by seeing the combination of projects people are naturally drawn to (e.g., if there are birders doing plant phenology projects, then knowing that association might help prioritize - or demonstrate the feasibility of - a bird-plant phenology research collaboration).
Also, projects will be able to evaluate the role they play in the citizen science ecosystem, for example, some project aim to be gateway projects...and with SciStarter, projects can assess whether they are succeeding in bringing people into citizen science projects more broadly. 

Also, assessing learning outcomes of volunteers can be more robust when considering their broader participation across projects, rather than assuming they their experiences are limited to one project. Plus, we'll be implementing some standardized ways (building on DEVISE instruments) to assess learning outcomes across projects. 

Bottom line - SciStarter provides information across the ecosystem of thousands of citizen science projects, and that may break down ideas about managing volunteers as though projects - and their volunteers - exist in silos.

 

 

Thanks for the info, Caren. It's great to hear how these insights can be gained with SciStarter, helping us understand more about participants across the spectrum of their activities and to connect with them in new ways.

Hi Jamie, Thanks for your comment. I answered Miyoko's question above with some brief examples, some related to how projects might "design" their volunteer communication and recruitment and some related to how the data can inform new research questions and cross-project collaborations. Let me know if you have other questions.  

Thanks for your comment, David...and for asking for the preprint. I'm glad understanding volunteer patterns across disciplinary boundaries is of interest. We'll send you the paper as soon as it is accepted! 

Thanks for watching and for the question, Jamie. That's the focus of research in my lab based on tools of the SciStarter platform!
I have a paper (in prep for far too long) based on survey results of volunteers in the Christmas Bird Count. We set out to compare contributions to citizen science (like number of CBC circles, etc) and associated conservation behaviors (like habitat restoration, etc) of volunteers who only do CBC and those who do other cit sci projects. We found that 100% of respondents - 3,000+ - did other bird citizen science projects! Perhaps not a big surprise in that CBC is seasonal and birding is year round and there are sooo many bird citizen science projects. Yet, we also found that 36% of the respondents also engaged in citizen science projects unrelated to birds - and these spanned the spectrum of topics (water, butterfly, weather, frogs) and modes (in the field, online). So YES, citizen scientists do multiple projects.

Does that mean they "transfer" from one project to another? Not necessarily, but that seems to be a common (mis?)perception. We've been interviewing project managers about their attitudes and perceptions on this topic and they speak about vertical movement (volunteers diving deeper into one project - managers want to encourage that) and horizontal movement (volunteers moving among projects - manager don't like that). But, volunteers can do multiple projects without "moving" at all (they don't have to drop one project to engage in another, within limits of their band width). Bottom line - what's really happening in terms of movement/transfer has not been highly investigated YET.

Much about SciStarter's new design facilitates investigating research questions about multi-project participation. For the first time, we can examine patterns of participation across thousands of projects among SciStarter members because volunteers populate their dashboards with the projects they do (and bookmark projects they are interested in). Do volunteers advance to more complex projects as their competences increase? Do volunteers who engage in citizen science projects spanning multiple disciplines have great science efficacy than those who stick to one discipline? Stay tuned for answers to these and more!

What do you think are the most pressing research questions in this area? 

BTW, In terms of CBC volunteer contributions to science and conservation outcomes, we found differences between volunteers who do only bird projects and those who do more than bird projects. I'll leave some suspense as to which type of volunteer contributed more....