Last week, I had the opportunity to travel to Fort Collins, CO to visit with the CitSci.org team at Colorado State University! CitSci.org provides online tools to help citizen science project coordinators create and customize projects, save data, and perform basic analyses on the collected data. Working with the team (Greg Newman, Nicole Kaplan, and Russ Scarpino), we discussed new additions for the CitSci.org platform that will help improve the experience for project coordinators and to make the citizen-collected data more accessible to and discoverable by scientists.
Citizen science projects have become very popular in recent years, but there is little corresponding uptake and re-use of citizen science data. With proper documentation, citizen science projects harness great potential to contribute to science. I am collaborating with the CitSci.org team to improve the documentation experience to ensure that it is both an easy process for project coordinators and produces metadata compatible with repositories such as GBIF to allow for automatic publications.
Over the next few months, I will regularly post updates of our progress so check back regularly!