Citizen data science for public good

The PhD research looks at the ways in which citizen data science can be used to advance the public good. It is a meta-research project which involves looking at mass collaborations in social sciences. For example looking at services like FixMyStreet, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and other crowd sourced data sources and how they compare to more conventional data in terms of criteria such as openness and accuracy. I also am interested in evaluating the benefits for participants in these projects, in particular the usefulness of citizen science projects in schools for widening participation in science. I also look at how citizen science can become a more open science by looking at issues such as data licensing for distributed data collection, visual documentation for greater inclusion of low literacy groups, and open sourced software for citizen science projects that rely upon smartphone applications.