Appendix: Resources and Examples
Useful Links, Blog Posts, and Documents:
- Project Builder Policies — Official Zooniverse policy about user-built projects.
- Project Review: Best Practices & Flowchart — Overview of project review process and timeline, with helpful diagram and list of suggestions for projects entering review process.
- Examples of Strong Newsletters — Samples of newsletters we have used.
- Overview of Talk — Best practices for Talk board usage and descriptions of associated team roles.
- What Are Moderators For? — Learn what moderators are and why you want them.
- Measuring Success in Citizen Science Projects: Part 1 and Part 2 — An analysis of past (and current) Zooniverse projects, demonstrating the importance of engagement.
- Who Are The Zooniverse Community? We Asked Them… — A summary of results from a survey of Zooniverse volunteers conducted as part of a master’s thesis in 2014-2015.
- Zooniverse GitHub — Zooniverse’s code base. You can submit issues and pull requests.
- Zooniverse Researchers & Moderators — Private Facebook group that you may join.
- Zooniverse Backchannel Blog — Private blog you may request to join. Posts are relatively rare and often concerned with technical details of handling Zooniverse data.
- 17 Tools for Social Media — Social media is important, but can also be time-consuming. These tools can help you pre-schedule, analyze, and get the most out of your posts.
- The Power of a Challenge — A challenge that got 650,000 classifications in a weekend.
- Zooniverse "Meta" Publications — for those wishing to know a lot more about research into the practice of citizen science. (Click the "Meta" link on the left side of the page.)
- Why We Don’t Have an ‘I Don’t Know’ Button — Volunteers often ask for some way to express uncertainty. Using Snapshot Serengeti, this explains why we want a best guess.
- Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit — Running a citizen science project from within the federal government comes with added constraints. This kit can help.
Examples of Project Builder Projects:
- Fossil Finder — Good example of content: name, tagline, help text/images, info pages.
- Whales as Individuals — Good example of tasks/questions with multiple workflows.
- Planet Four: Terrains — Has a strong focus on researcher/volunteer interaction on Talk.
- "Kitteh Zoo" — Lighthearted sample project illustrating many of the Builder’s capabilities.
Examples of Gamized Behavior:
- Chimp & See Talk — This popular Talk is also used for the "Chimp ID" process: a good example of non-competitive gamized behavior that also serves a research purpose.
- My Galaxies — Write text using galaxies as letters; built with volunteer help.
- Cookie recipes for Seafloor Explorer, Worm Watch Lab and Notes From Nature.
- Snapshot Serengeti Meme Generator — allowed users to caption photos (now defunct).
- Zooniverse project cocktails for Advent, part one and part two.
- Just for Fun — Various "fun" posts on the Zooniverse blog, many about gamizing.