Through my work at Zooniverse, I worked with the MICO Project looking at what motivates citizen science volunteers on Snapshot Serengeti. Our research found that mundane images actually increase, not reduce, volunteer engagement.
The work was presented at the HCOMP 2015 conference, as a work-in-progress paper (PDF version here) and as a poster as shown below (poster PDF here):
The story of the work that I did is detailed in these blog posts I wrote (but mainly the last one, which expands on the paper):
- Snapshot Serengeti Ready for MICO
- An Unexpected Discovery
- Why Citizen Science Researchers Shouldn’t Remove Mundane Images
Dr. Alex Bowyer 