Further Reading
Motivations of Citizen Scientists
Raddick, M.J., Bracey, G., Gay, P.L., Lintott, C.J., Murray, P., Schawinski, K., Szalay, A.S. and Vandenberg, J., 2009. Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the motivations of citizen science volunteers. Available here. You'll see the tables of reasons people gave for participating in Galaxy Zoo, but also a lot of background information about the Galaxy Zoo project and an interesting interview script for talking to participants.
Rotman, D., Hammock, J., Preece, J., Hansen, D., Boston, C., Bowser, A. and He, Y., 2014. Motivations affecting initial and long-term participation in citizen science projects in three countries. IConference 2014 Proceedings. A useful summary of short versus long-term participation, available here.
Eveleigh, A., Jennett, C., Blandford, A., Brohan, P. and Cox, A.L., 2014, April. Designing for dabblers and deterring drop-outs in citizen science. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2985-2994). Available here with a video, this may give you ideas for long-term participation.
A lively and insightful blogpost by Crispin Butteriss at BangTheTable: "Lessons from citizen science for community engagement practice". Drawing on some citizen science literature and comparing it to communities in general, we look at long term motivations and also at a community's creativity.
The YouTube channel on which we met Erica Leonora Mimms and Pietro Michelucci talking about StallCatchers is here.
The interview with Egle Marija Ramanauskaite, also of StallCatchers, in which she mentions leaving academia for citizen science, is here. She also mentions working with communities and designing for accessibility.
Communications and Engagement
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations offers some excellent blogging tips here.
The Zooniverse offers some sample newsletters here.
The complete text of the Richard Feynman speech with the tip to avoid jargon is here. It contains some lovely stories of how people learn science in practice. (It also contains some extremely incorrect assumptions about women's abilities, which are sadly not yet entirely overcome by all professional scientists. You may be interested to know that women are unusually well represented in some areas of citizen science - although, in general, well-educated, white, affluent people still tend to be overrepresented.)
The "Object of the Day" Galaxy Zoo page, a volunteer-led daily news page which ran from around 2008 to 2013, and which participants found especially engaging.
If you are planning to use social media extensively for your citizen science project, the Social Media Management for Citizen Science module may be especially useful to you.
Communities - face-to-face
Book: Artemis Skarlatidou and Muki Haklay: "Geographic Citizen Science Design: No one left behind." UCL Press, 2021. You can download it free here, or JSTOR links here for individual chapters. This book will cover an enormous amount of citizen science, especially work with indigenous communities, including the "FPIC" (Free, Prior and Informed Consent) process.
For more on the FPIC process, this Participatory Learning and Action special issue is devoted to participatory tools and protocols, and a description of how to implement FPIC is here.
Vohland, K., Land-Zandstra, A., Ceccaroni, L., Lemmens, R., Perelló, J., Ponti, M., Samson, R., Wagenknecht, K., Paleco, C., Kaufmann, J. and Argyri, P., 2020. Inclusiveness and Diversity in Citizen Science. The Science of Citizen Science, pp.261-281. Available here. Open access and contains many statistics but also some very helpful tips to engage and involve people equitably.
The Conservation Volunteers has a wonderful list of resources aimed at anyone working with members of the public in wildlife and conservation citizen scientists, including special guides on how to support young or older volunteers or those with physical or learning difficulties.
The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) offers several useful pages on face-to-face community building. It is focused on the voluntary sector which tends to be quite top-down and more similar to professional employment than citizen science, but if you are going to be working with groups of people, or recruiting and organising individuals, you may find some of these pages useful:
NCVO: How to map and analyse the needs of your local area
NCVO: How to communicate with your local community
NCVO: Successful leadership qualities
NCVO: How to hire, organise and keep your volunteers happy
The EU-Citizen.Science module "Train the Trainer" may be especially helpful to you if you are planning to set up face-to-face groups.
Communities - online
Book: Kraut, Robert E. and Resnick, Paul: "Building Successful Online Communities". MIT Press, 2012. Available from MIT Press and JSTOR. Goes into an enormous amount of detail about how to begin an online community, deal with newcomers and with poor online behaviour, and how contribution of content keeps them going.
Book: Michael Nielsen, "Reinventing Discovery", Princeton University Press, 2011. You can read the first chapter for free here, and find it on JSTOR here. This book is about the principle of open science and working together, and Chapter 7 goes into some detail about the discovery of the Green Peas on Galaxy Zoo by following the discussions and idea-bouncing of the volunteers.
Baruch, A., May, A. and Yu, D., 2016. The motivations, enablers and barriers for voluntary participation in an online crowdsourcing platform. Computers in Human Behavior, 64, pp.923-931. Available here, and a brilliant and moving read about the experiences and feelings of several sick, elderly and disabled volunteers who wished to assist in disaster relief efforts, and the importance of community and feedback.
Preece, J., 2016. Citizen science: New research challenges for human–computer interaction. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 32(8), pp.585-612. Available here. An interesting and thorough examination not just of communities but also of data, technology, design and ecology.
The Zooniverse has a great many resources for people creating online projects, each of which would come with their own online community. A sample is below:
Blogpost: "Who are the Zooniverse community? We asked them." Some interesting statistics.
A general Zooniverse Community Standards page you may find useful. Every project and community is different, so you will need to choose your own specific guidelines.
"What are moderators for?" Some tips on how to select moderators, and what tasks you might give them.
Learning, creativity and mentorship
Book: Sharman Apt Russel, "Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World." Oregon State University Press, 2014. Written in a warm, personal style, you'll learn a lot about fieldwork and the environment, as well as her face-to-face outreach and her collaboration with scientists.
Jennett, C., Kloetzer, L., Schneider, D., Iacovides, I., Cox, A., Gold, M., Fuchs, B., Eveleigh, A., Methieu, K., Ajani, Z. and Talsi, Y., 2016. Motivations, learning and creativity in online citizen science. Journal of Science Communication, 15(3). Available here. A paper about the skills citizen scientists acquire through participation.
Blogpost: "How many citizen scientists in the world?" by Muki Haklay, which looks at levels of participation and how someone can gain skills (or time and availability!) to move "up" a level.
Blogpost: "Peas in the Universe, goodwill and a history of zooite collaboration on the Peas Project." An informally written blogpost by Alice Sheppard from 2009 on the lighthearted yet passionate community-led research into a new type of galaxy.
Video (90 minutes): "Volunteers in their own Voices" by SciStarter. As part of CitSciCon2021, a panel of long term, deeply engaged citizen science volunteers from various projects were invited to tell their stories and take questions from each other and the audience. A moving and fascinating series of insights into people's personal and intellectual journeys, and some inspirational examples of citizen science projects which did mentor and train volunteers.
Conference poster: Raddick, J., Bracey, G. and Gay, P.L., 2009, May. " Do-It-Ourselves Science": Case Studies of Volunteer-Initiated Citizen Science Involvement. In American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts# 214 (Vol. 214, pp. 401-10). Available here.
General
The 10 Principles of Citizen Science: A set of principles developed by the European Citizen Science Association's "Sharing best practice and building capacity" working group in 2015. Several of them apply to community building and collaborative work.
West, S.E. and Pateman, R.M., 2016. Recruiting and retaining participants in citizen science: What can be learned from the volunteering literature?. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. Available here.
Zooniverse Best Practices. A large repository of resources for setting up your Zooniverse project, including several pages relevant to communities.
Article on The Conversation: "Can citizen science empower disenfranchised communities?" No direct advice, but thought-provoking and raises important questions about equity and access.
Blogpost by Parenting Science Gang: "25 things we learned by running a radical citizen science project about nappies, as you do." A hilarious and encouraging account of practical experiments done by parents across the UK.
Some existing citizen science discussion forums: what's out there?
Citizen Science Facebook group
Zooniverse Talk (note that the Zooniverse has >100 projects, and each one will have its own specific Talk pages)
The old Galaxy Zoo forum (archived)