NatureNet: An Interaction Design with a Focus on Crowdsourcing for Community

Citizen science projects adopt a crowdsourcing model for collecting and analyzing scientific data for the purpose of improving science and encouraging non-scientists to participate in science projects. For example, the iNaturalist model relies on crowds of citizen scientists to scale both the detection and identification of species from photo vouchers. EBird, as another example, crowd sources bird observation data. Both of these projects leverage community interactions for effective data collection and validation, where the data is used to support environmental sustainability research [1]. In NatureNet, the interaction design has a focus on creating an online community around informal learning about environmental sustainability issues and on engaging the community to extend and customize the design of the technology to better support their environmental sustainability projects.