The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change-related citizen science web prototype (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The prototype will be a mobile-friendly website that allows citizens to take and submit photos and other “ground truth” observations to the Trusted Authorities, during /after floods. This information can be used to help the authorities assess and predict the flood or disaster scope and impact.

We are building a software prototype that allows citizens to submit photos and other "ground truth" observations to the Trusted Authorities, during/after floods. Please research and recommend a “trust model” – a set of processes that we can use in the citizen science web application defining a “veracity” or trust score to citizen scientists and their observations. This will help us determine how much oversight / weight the trusted authorities should place on citizen scientists' submitted observations. We would like assistance with defining how "Trust" can be based on whether the citizen scientist undertook certain tutorials/performed certain actions/filled in their profile/confirmed their geographic location etc.

Your Contribution

We would like you research a trust model for verifying citizen contributions, so we can assign a trust rating that Trusted Authorities can apply to them.

At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its use case, goals and objectives, and even detailed low-level fidelity wireframes. and other recommendations behind the proposed citizen science web application features. Below are suggestions to consider:

• Participants were required to be legal age/18 years or older to select a public username.
• Recommendation System to calculate trust based on the user's profile and history
• Evaluate community trust – members of the network assign trust rankings to other members or users can assign rank based on the quality and consistency of uploads
• Repeated interactions between those involved in citizen science, as well as perceptions of transparency, fairness, and legitimacy are important prerequisites for building or maintaining trust (Lauber, 1999; Fernandez-Gimenez et al., 2008).

We will avail ourselves to meeting with students participating in this study once a week or as necessary to provide guidance and suggested research.