Janis Dickinson (Cornell University)
Abstract. The advent of the social Web has created new opportunities for targeted research on how people learn, collaborate, and cooperate online. With funding from the NSF, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology launched a new socio-ecological citizen science project, YardMap.org, in 2012. YardMap is an online research system created to explore the design of socially networked citizen science platforms to support environmental collective actions in the offline world. It combines social networking with map-hacking to ask how we can incentivize small acts that, when performed in backyards, parks, corporate campuses, and schools, will scale up to significant collective improvement in species conservation outcomes, water conservation, and energy savings. Designed with reputational visibility, YardMap is a cross between a citizen science project and a user-generated content system. It allows participants to peek over the virtual fence and see what others are doing, earn badges, display objects, chat, and earn visibility based on achieving a basic standard of map quality. Our preliminary experiment, which ended on September 3, was an A/B test of learning and behavioral practices in YardMap, based on randomly allocating new participants to versions with and without the social and reputational features. With new NSF funding in 2014 we are embarking on testing different modes of social enrichment to explore the multidirectional interface between activity, learning, and behavior.