Page 72 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

ZHAO Yuxiang / A preliminary exploration on citizen science projects based on scientific crowdsourcing perspectives: 071
Conceptualization, pattern design and research opportunities

bases, digital culture bases, mass entrepreneurship workshops, and even some relevant non-profit
organizations and government departments while scientist or scientist group are excluded. The
author puts forward that since the nature of citizen science projects involves scientific research
tasks, such projects cannot be expected to be accepted by the public spontaneously and completed
efficiently. The traditional crowdsourcing project operation mode relies more on the platform’s
own incentive design and task promotion to drive the whole process, and is often inadequate in
the cold start, dead circulation and whole-process supervision of the project, and is even more
hopeless in the training of project participants and the communication of multiple subjects. This
article places great emphases on the involvement of third party organizations. By building a
matrix project management mechanism, third party organizations are supposed to assist research
teams with the structure and process optimization of the citizen science projects with respect to
task design and implementation, resource integration and data management, user motivation and
training, multi-subject communication and collaboration, and help research teams to shoulder the
project management responsibilities such as business management, data management and process
management, and propose practical solutions to various problems in different stages of the citizen
science projects. The operational framework is shown in figure 3.

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Figure 3. Institutional view in the scientific crowdsourcing process.

In order to better reveal the operation model of citizen science projects from the perspective
of scientific crowdsourcing, this paper further describes the concrete process of citizen science
projects by using the pseudo ER model (entity-relation model) commonly used in the conceptual
structure design. Based on the “task-driven, goal-oriented” nature of scientific crowdsourcing,
the author adds the entity of scientific task on the basis of figure 3. In traditional crowdsourcing