Does Volunteer Engagement Pay Off? An Analysis of User Participation in Online Citizen Science Projects

An increasing number of Citizen Science (CS) projects rely on digital technologies for data collection and processing as well as for the coordination and communication between participants. However, these projects raise the question about whether the interplay between professional scientists and volunteers actually constitutes a collaborative working relationship in terms of shared goals, initiative and responsibility. A related question is about added values and benefits that volunteers gain by their participation. These issues have been studied with a sample of projects taken from the Zooniverse platform, particularly by analysing the communications found in the projects’ forum pages. Social network analysis techniques are used to identify structural characteristics underlying the forum interactions as basic measures that are repeated over time sequences to capture the dynamic changes. The results show that a smaller group of volunteer users is responsible for a large portion of communication and coordination actions, with some of them being promoted to moderators, which can be seen as a reward and incentive.