New feature: "User Roles" for Citizen Science apps (Data Quality Pack)

The next SPOTTERON Update brings 3 new extension for all Citizen Science apps on the platform. One of the new features are the upcoming "User Roles", part of SPOTTERON's data quality pack.

Data Quality is always an important part in running a Citizen Science project, and sometimes observations of the users don't match that. The location can be off, the classification can be wrong. To improve data quality and also involve experienced users on a deeper level, we have introduced the new "User role" feature.

With this new functionality for all Citizen Science apps on the SPOTTERON platfrom, the admins of a project can promote trusted users to "moderators" in the administration interface. These moderator users can now edit the submitted data of other Citizen Scientists in the app and correct information, change the classification if a e.g. a species is wrong in an observation or even remove a copyrighted picture if present in a user's upload. 

Moderator users get an unique icon in their profile picture (crown icon) and regular users, whose spots get edited by a moderator, will get a notification in the news feed panel of the Citizen Science app. 

In the Citizen Science apps:

In the Administration Interface

In the Administration interface, the user roles will also be visible and users can be promoted to moderators directly in the spot list:

The "User Roles" feature will be an important step forward to increase the data quality while reducing the workload of the project scientists.For the promoted users, it is also a motivational benefit to be able to share their knowledge and help with the Citizen Science project's data.

More tools for Citizen Science data quality

More extensions with a focus on data quality on the SPOTTERON Citizen Science platform will come soon for all projects. Especially the Flagging Feature, in which Citizen Scientists can highlight wrong entries, disputable data or simply errors in observations, will have a high impact on how a project can manage the data and how much time that costs. The flags, already visible in the screenshot of the Administration Interface above, are counted per spot and the admins can filter to show the most-flagged spots easily. By that, the attention is there where it needs to be - powered by the community this asset will save time and help with a good data standard.

Additionally, the "Data Download" will allow projects to publish their complete data set as OpenData to the public. This extension is already live e.g. at the Web-App of the Crowdwater Project @ www.spotteron.com/crowdwater - check it out and do your own analysis based on hydrology Citizen Science data.