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Motivation for Participation: From General Volunteerism to Online Citizen Science

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Book cover Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education ((PSAE))

Abstract

Some citizen scientists are incredibly committed to a project and spend many hours a week on the project task sometimes over many months or years. This chapter considers previous research in this area and begins by considering the motivation to take part in more general forms of volunteering and in other types of ‘commons-based peer production’ such as editing for Wikipedia and writing open source software which have some similarities with online citizen science. It then considers research work on online citizen science, with results generally illustrating that participants are often quite altruistic in their motivation and take part because they want to help scientists make new discoveries.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. BOINC software (or ‘middleware’) is now used in most distributed computing projects. It is based on the software originally developed for SETI@home .

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  1. Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Vickie Curtis

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  1. Vickie Curtis
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Curtis, V. (2018). Motivation for Participation: From General Volunteerism to Online Citizen Science. In: Online Citizen Science and the Widening of Academia. Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77664-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77664-4_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77663-7

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