Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 5, 2026

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Setting up crowd science projects
Kaja Scheliga, Sascha Friesike1, Cornelius Puschmann2
1Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany.
Abstract:
Crowd science is scientific research that is conducted with the participation of volunteers who are not professional scientists. Thanks to the Internet and online platforms, project initiators can draw on a potentially large number of volunteers. This crowd can be involved to support data-rich or labour-intensive projects that would otherwise be unfeasible. So far, research on crowd science has mainly focused on analysing individual crowd science projects. In our research, we focus on the perspective of project initiators and explore how crowd science projects are set up. Based on multiple case study research, we discuss the objectives of crowd science projects and the strategies of their initiators for accessing volunteers. We also categorise the tasks allocated to volunteers and reflect on the issue of quality assurance as well as feedback mechanisms. With this article, we contribute to a better understanding of how crowd science projects are set up and how volunteers can contribute to science. We suggest that our findings are of practical relevance for initiators of crowd science projects, for science communication as well as for informed science policy making.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
What are Populations and Communities?
Data Collection by Experiments
An example of the experimental method is a public clinical trial...
Systematic Sampling Method
Systematic sampling is one of the simplest methods...
Cluster Sampling Method
To choose a cluster sample, divide the population into clusters (groups) and then randomly select some of the clusters. All the members from these clusters are in the cluster sample. For example, if you randomly sample four departments from your...
Data Collection by Observations
An astronomer viewing the motion and brightness of stars in the sky and recording the data is an example of observational data collection. A botanist recording...
Experimental Designs

