User Participation in the Process of Creating a Citizen Science Portal

Abstract. Citizen science (CS) relies on cooperation with members of the public. This usually requires a lot of contact to reconcile the needs of the researchers and project staff with the user to retain an active user base. We explore with our CS web portal the potential of including the participants in the creation and design process of the portal. This is done by providing the users with easy access to our design and research staff and approaching people for qualitative feedback. To a large extent, our users do not have obvious ties to academic institutions, however, the vast majority of feedback comes from academics. We categorized the feedback, explored users’ backgrounds, and compared our active user retention to another CS project, which turns out to be comparable.