Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Crowd sourcing in an attention economy
Olivier Rovellotti, Julie Chabalier, Amandine Sahl

Building: Grand Hotel Mediterraneo
Room: Africa (formerly America del Sud)
Date: 2013-10-30 02:30 PM – 02:45 PM
Last modified: 2013-10-08

Abstract


Using crowdsourcing to gather and document biodiversity information has been seen by many as a silver bullet. The lack of professional naturalists, and funding resources to hire more, have pushed regional and national institutions around the world in ambitious citizen science programs.

However in todays over saturated attention economy [1] it seems more and more difficult to motivate new or existing users into contributing. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of the industries it touches; there is no reason why we should be left out.

In this paper, we analyse new mechanisms that can be activated to work around the current situation.  We focus on the concept of ROI (Return on Investment), Gamification [2] and Emotional Design [3] as a means to re-invent Citizen Science programs and maybe make them work for us.

Through our recent experience on a number of citizen science projects, we have been able to test and implement some of these concepts.

[1] Simon, H. A. (1971), "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World", in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X

[2] Dan Hunter, Kevin Werbach (2012), For The Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business: Wharton Digital Press.

[3] Norman, D. A. (2005). Emotional Design. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-05136-7.