Information Science Goals

A critical issue in citizen science is attracting and retaining enough participants to make achievement of project goals possible. Systems with too little participation will be unlikely to generate meaningful quantities of scientific data.

We think that games have great potential as a motivator for participation and as a tool for producing high quality scientific data, so Citizen Sort lets us explore how different kinds of games and tools might make citizen science more fun for participants. In addition, Citizen Sort lets us explore how different kinds of players, games, and tools might produce different qualities of data in the biological sciences.

When you register to play games on Citizen Sort, you will be contributing to the work of biologists, but also helping us to better understand motivation and gaming in the citizen science context!