Developing information technology to democratize scientific knowledge and support citizen empowerment is a challenging task. In our case, a local community suffered from air pollution caused by industrial activity. The residents lacked the technological fluency to gather and curate diverse scientific data to advocate for regulatory change. We collaborated with the community in developing an air quality monitoring system which integrated heterogeneous data over a large spatial and temporal scale. The system afforded strong scientific evidence by using animated smoke images, air quality data, crowdsourced smell reports, and wind data. In our evaluation, we report patterns of sharing smoke images among stakeholders. Our survey study shows that the scientific knowledge provided by the system encourages agonistic discussions with regulators, empowers the community to support policy making, and rebalances the power relationship between stakeholders.
Citizen-science projects engage volunteers to gather or process data to address scientific questions. But citizen-science projects vary in their ability to contribute usefully for science, conservation, or public pol- icy. eBird has evolved from a basic citizen-science project into a collective enterprise, taking a novel approach to citizen science by developing cooperative partnerships among experts in a wide range of fields: population and distributions, conservation biologists, quantitative ecologists, statisticians, com- puter scientists, GIS and informatics specialists, application developers, and data administrators. The goal is to increase data quantity through participant recruitment and engagement, but also to quantify and control for data quality issues such as observer variability, imperfect detection of species, and both spatial and temporal bias in data collection. Advances at the interface among ecology, statistics, and computer science allow us to create new species distribution models that provide accurate estimates across broad spatial and temporal scales with extremely detailed resolution. eBird data are openly available and used by a broad spectrum of students, teachers, scientists, NGOs, government agencies, land managers, and policy makers. Feedback from this broad data use community helps identify development priorities. As a result, eBird has become a major source of biodiversity data, increasing our knowledge of the dynamics of species distributions, and having a direct impact on the conservation of birds and their habitats. Across HCI and social computing platforms, mobile applications that support citizen science, empowering non-experts to explore, collect, and share data have emerged. While many of these efforts have been successful, it remains difficult to create citizen science applications without extensive programming expertise. To address this concern, we present Sensr, an authoring environment that enables people without programming skills to build mobile data collection and management tools for citizen science. We demonstrate how Sensr allows people without technical skills to create mobile applications. Findings from our case study demonstrate that our system successfully overcomes technical constraints and provides a simple way to create mobile data collection tools.  Citizen science projects can collect a wealth of scientific data, but that data is only helpful if it is actually used. While previous citizen science research has mostly focused on designing effective capture interfaces and incentive mechanisms, in this paper we explore the application of HCI methods to ensure that the data itself is useful. To provide a focus for this exploration we designed and implemented Creek Watch, an iPhone application and website that allow volunteers to report information about waterways in order to aid water management programs. Working with state and local officials and private groups involved in water monitoring, we conducted a series of contextual inquiries to uncover what data they wanted, what data they could immediately use, and how to most effectively deliver that data to them. We iteratively developed the Creek Watch application and website based on our findings and conducted evaluations of it with both contributors and consumers of water data, including scientists at the city water resources department. Our study reveals that the data collected is indeed useful for their existing practices and is already in use in water and trash management programs. Our results suggest the application of HCI methods to design the data for the end users is just as important as their use in designing the user interface. This article explores the opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining large-scale “content curation communities” through an in-depth case study of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Content curation communities are large-scale crowdsourcing endeavors that aim to curate existing content into a single repository, making these communities different from content creation communities such as Wikipedia. In this article, we define content curation communities and provide examples of this increasingly important genre. We then follow by presenting EOL, a compelling example of a content curation community, and describe a case study of EOL based on analysis of interviews, online discussions, and survey data. Our findings are characterized into two broad categories: information integration and social integration. Information integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) accommodate and validate multiple sources and (b) integrate traditional peer reviewed sources with user-generated, nonpeer-reviewed content. Social integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) establish the credibility of open-access resources within the scientific community and (b) facilitate collaboration between experts and novices. After identifying the challenges, we discuss the potential strategies EOL and other content curation communities can use to address them, and provide technical, content, and social design recommendations for overcoming them. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.