Zooniverse U.S.-UK Planning Meeting: Bringing together Science and Education Teams

OISE 09-37322

Lucy Fortson

Adler Planetarium

This project supports the travel of five senior staff and three graduate students to London to participate in a Zooniverse planning meeting at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Zooniverse builds on the success of Galaxy Zoo, a web-based citizen science project based at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The primary purpose of the meeting is to give the project teams the momentum to take Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse extensions to the next level and push the field of citizen science forward. Citizen science projects by their very nature provide opportunities to engage the users in activities that encourage a deeper appreciation and understanding of the scientific method. To gain the full educational potential while at the same time maximizing the peer-reviewed science output from citizen science projects requires that all of the stakeholders ? scientists, educators and technologists ? be present and able to cross-communicate, weigh-in, collaborate, discuss, elaborate, and synthesize their needs, the needs and abilities of their customers, and the constraints of the process and system they see. At this stage of development of Zooniverse, it is important that the science and education teams develop a common understanding of each team?s needs and resources so that the fully built Zooniverse will have education and science objectives seamlessly integrated through-out.

This project will advance, through widespread public participation, NSF?s twin goals of discovery and education.