What do citizen scientists want to know first? (2 minutes)

First and foremost, what you’re asking them to do and why!

On your project website, and on material you write attracting people to it, it’s useful to state the basics. People will be curious about the scientific phenomena you’re studying – for example, precisely what dark energy or a flying squirrel or Alzheimer’s disease is, or whereabouts penguins live and why it’s thought that they’re declining. 

(Image: "Half a million king penguins at St Andrews Bay, South Georgia", taken from PenguinWatch, 2019.)

They’ll want to know what you hope will result from their work – for example, that clicking on buildings in satellite pictures will help disaster relief reach them, or that cosmologists will be able to explain a bit more about the expansion rate of the Universe. 

Your project may be a very small area in a very large field. Don’t worry. You don't have to promise anything miraculous – it only needs to sound interesting, which science generally does! 

Show why the task is interesting or helpful.  The BBC article we saw in the previous section pointed out: “The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern recognition tasks like this” and “You get to see parts of space that have never been seen before. These images were taken by a robotic telescope and processed automatically, so the odds are that when you log on, that first galaxy you see will be one that no human has seen before.”

However, don’t over-promise. Stall Catchers, for example, the Alzheimer's project we met earlier, was originally named WeCureALZ. Obviously the hope was to find a cure for the disease. But since no one can promise that, its founders decided to change the name.

People will want to know what they need in order to do the task – a computer? A smartphone? A tape measure? Specialist equipment, such as sensors or meters? Will it take a great deal of time, or require regular commitment? Will there be any costs, such as for shipping items? Can they do the task at home or do they have to travel? Are there privacy concerns – for example, will their recording reveal their current location, or their home address? You might write these as an FAQ on your website, or in an automated e-mail you send to everyone who signs up. 

Once you've got people on board and contributing regularly, the type of things they'll want to know will gradually change. We'll look at this in the following sections.