Effective Collaboration with Advanced Users: Backyard Worlds,  what works & what they're working on
Channel: Sarah Kirn
Date: 2024-04-03

Backyard Worlds is NASA's most scientifically prolific citizen science project. Much of its success hinges on how the project team invites participants into advanced conversations and work. These conversation lay the foundation for collaboration among scientists and participants on side projects, scientific publications, and development of new software tools to support project work. In this event, two scientist from the team - Marc Kuchner and Adam Schneider - were joined by two advanced participants - Farid Cedeno and Léopold Gramaize. After a short presentation on the work and accomplishments of the Backyard Worlds project, the team presented two issues they see as critical to address to support healthy growth of the project: 
1. How do we provide volunteers with faster feedback? and
2. What explains the dearth of women among our advanced users, and what might be done to engage a more gender-balanced participant community?

This recording includes the discussion that followed, including comments by our two invited respondents, Dr. Stella Kafka and Dr. Patricia Knezek.