It’s been a busy month for me and my Citsci.org collaborators, but we have almost completed our PLOS Biology community page paper. We wrote it together in Google docs, which was an interesting experience, and will submit it at the end of this month. If the editors are happy with it, it should be coming out later this year and publicly available.
After this paper is completed, I will be working with the Citsci team to continue designing the metadata documentation user interface. Our plan is to make it easy and even enjoyable to create useful metadata. We will incentivize project managers to complete all possible metadata fields using similar tactics as online networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn) with progress bars and badges. Another reward of completing documentation is automated data storage and indexing to an appropriate repository (e.g., GBIF).
All this is still in the planning and design stage, so we look forward to any comments from the citizen science community. Please direct any feedback to me at yiweiwang@dataone.unm.edu