This is a reminder that the deadline for submitting abstracts for this session on the validation, curation and management of citizen science data at the SciDataCon is on Monday, June 25.  They  would use people’s help in recruiting papers, especially from African citizen science groups. Given costs, it may be most pragmatic to focus on southern African (or South African) groups, but CS groups or researchers from all over the world are welcome to participate.  To submit, go to: https://www.scidatacon.org/IDW2018/sessions/.

Assessment of Data Management Practices of the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Communities

Alex de Sherbinin and Anne Bowser

The objectives of the CODATA–WDS Task Group on citizen science data are to better understand the ecosystem of data-generating citizen science, crowdsourcing, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) projects so as to characterize the potential and challenges of these developments for science as a whole, and data science in particular. Through interviews with principals involved in 50 projects, the task group has assessed the methods and approaches for validating various streams of citizen science data, the mechanisms for cleaning and curating the data, and systems in place for the long-term management, documentation and dissemination of those data. This presentation reports on results of this assessment, and provides recommendations to the citizen science / crowdsourcing community on data quality and management practices.