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This paper explores the assumptions that citizen science (CS) project leaders had about their volunteers’ science inquiry skill–proficiency overall, and then examines volunteers’ actual proficiency in one specific skill, scientific observation, because it is fundamental to and shared by many projects. This work shares findings from interviews with 10 project leaders related to two common assumptions leaders have about their volunteers’ skill proficiency: one, that volunteers can perform the necessary skills to participate at the start of a CS project, and therefore may not need training; and two, volunteer skill proficiency improves over time through involvement in the CS project. In order to answer questions about the degree of accuracy to which volunteers can perform the necessary skills and about differences in their skill proficiency based on experience and data collection procedures, we analyzed data from seven CS projects that used two shared embedded assessment tools, each focused on skills within the context of scientific observation in natural settings: Notice relevant features for taxonomic identification and record standard observations. This across-project and cross-sectional study found that the majority of citizen science volunteers (n = 176) had the necessary skill proficiency to collect accurate scientific observations but proficiency varied based on volunteer experience and project data collection procedures.
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
An optimization framework to provide volunteers with task selection autonomy and group opportunities
Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs) rely on volunteers to support community needs but struggle with making strategic volunteer-to-task assignments to enable volunteer satisfaction, and completion of complex tasks. Creation of volunteer groups and their assignment to NPO tasks can help achieve these goals by providing volunteers with opportunity for networking, collaboration, and peer learning. However, strategically creating ideal assignments is challenging because (i) there are exponentially many ways a set of volunteers can be assigned in groups; and (ii) NPOs tend to have limited and uncertain data concerning volunteers’ personal preferences, availabilities, and motivations to participate. To address these challenges, this research contributes by introducing an integer programming framework to offer volunteers a menu of tasks to choose from and then based on volunteers’ willingness information, creates ideal homogenous volunteer group assignments. These groups are created such that the group collectively meet a task’s skill requirements and groups of volunteers of similar skill and affinity levels are prioritized. We apply the developed methodology to a case study based on a partner NPO that works with remote volunteers from multiple countries to produce online educational content. The menu creation method can improve NPO and volunteer-based performance metrics, where the most improvement is observed when a NPO is faced with very picky volunteers. Presenting volunteers with larger menus of tasks also leads to an improvement in ideal group creations. Implementing the group creation methodology helps obtain a statistically significant increase in ideal group creations but results in a tradeoff of decreased benefits to volunteers and the NPO. Finally, implementing a minimum desired group size does not severely impact most KPIs and would be beneficial for an NPO to implement as it encourages the creation and assignment of volunteer groups to tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751801
- PAR ID:
- 10565239
- Publisher / Repository:
- Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
- Volume:
- 96
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0038-0121
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102095
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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