User engagement analysis report

This study looks at classification (transcribed) data from the three citizen research projects in Engaging Crowds, which were set up on the Zooniverse platform: HMS NHS: The Nautical Health Service, Scarlets and Blues and The RBGE Herbarium: Exploring Gesneriaceae, the African violet family.

Each project presents volunteers with a series of tasks (known as ‘workflows’ in Zooniverse terminology). The projects and their workflows are summarised in Tables 1, 2 and 3 below. From these we can see that HMS NHS is the largest and longest-running of the three projects and so gives us our best sample of volunteer behaviour. We can also see that the workflows in The RBGE Herbarium were completed most quickly by volunteers, possibly aided by the project’s familiarity: it is perhaps most similar to the majority of Zooniverse projects, which deal with observational scientific data in simple workflows with short tasks. Volunteers tended to contribute to just one of the Engaging Crowds projects. Within the data analysed, only 13 volunteers contributed to all three projects.