MyResearchChallenge.digital - A Participatory Problem Discovery System for Citizen Design Science Research

To solve societal problems, it is essential to engage with actual problem owners in society in a scalable way. In this paper, we follow a Citizen Design Science Research (CDSR) paradigm proposing to more actively involve society in DSR projects. Specifically, we present MyResearchChallenge.digital, a prototypical system that supports participatory problem discovery by enabling the involvement of citizens in problem awareness in a scalable way. The system allows researchers and citizens to cooperate on the exploration of a given problem space, leveraging the creativity and wisdom of the crowd for identifying and describing relevant DSR problems. The evaluation of the prototype with 30 representative citizens points to the system’s strengths and opportunities related to its ease of use and the problem articulation feature but also reveals weaknesses and threats concerning the problem exploration features and issues about platform abuse.