By You’re busy. Your work, your life, your citizen science, it all takes time. We get it. You’re the reason all of us here at CitSci.org come to work every day – to make it easier for you to accomplish great citizen science. We’ve been hammering away behind the scenes to improve CitSci.org. Here are few items you’ve asked for that we’ve recently added/improved:
- Crowdsource data collection with open membership – You now have the ability to create CitSci.org projects where anyone can participate without needing approval from a project manager. Planning a bioblitz? Advertise your Project Profile link and anyone can use your datasheets and share data with you. This open membership project lets you to reach thousands of participants and is great for projects where you want maximum participation and do not need to manage each member. Check out Bloomwatch as a prime example – a project enlisting anyone to take photos of algal blooms in lakes. You still have the ability to create approval-based projects (where managers approve members) when needed. It’s your call!
- Collect sensitive data and keep it private – Does your project collect sensitive data that is best not displayed nor shared freely, such as endangered species data? We now offer an option to make your project data private. Using this setting, only project members can view and download project data. See our Project List and check out projects with a padlock as examples of private projects.
- Assign team members to specific site locations – You can now pre-populate your data sheets with specific pre-defined site locations and pre-assign volunteers to these sites.
- Capture team conversations with Forums – Each project profile now has its own forum where you and your team can post questions and discuss topics of interest. This captures the conversation for everyone and is especially handy if you and your volunteers are geographically dispersed. Plus – it makes communicating among members a breeze.
- Store research notes, meeting minutes, and more with your project Wiki – Each project profile now has a Wiki tab where you, as manager, can add important information for your team like research notes, meeting minutes, background information, management plans, and more.
We hope you find these new features useful. As always, if you’re using CitSci.org and think of a feature that would make it easier to manage your project, send us an email.
Plus – check out great examples of projects using features we’ve been offering for years:
- Graphing data – Example: Air and water temperature at a creek since 2012
- Leveraging photos to capture data – Example: Pollen color variation in trout lilies
- Viewing species frequencies – Example: Frequency of aquatic invasive plant species
- Exploring dynamic summary statistics – Example: mean, min, max, std. deviation, and sample size for Trout Unlimited data
We’d love to have your feedback on these tools, and look forward to expanding our capabilities in the future!
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