A subscription-based authoring tool for mobile citizen science campaigns

Across HCI and social computing platforms we have seen the rapid emergence and adoption of mobile applications to empower non-experts to explore, measure, and share data about their world from blooming flowers to air quality. However, the creation of mobile citizen science applications with the type and method of data collected remains under the control of the developers and accompanying infrastructure of each citizen science effort. In this paper we present a flexible subscription-based web tool for non-experts to create and manage citizen science campaigns. Using our system, people can author their own campaigns with no programming skills and development infrastructure. We evaluated a functional prototype of our system with three groups having genuine needs to develop and deploy their own mobile citizen science applications. We hope that our system can help flourish citizen science activities and increase everyday people's participation in the citizen science data collection activities.