Collaborative Research Efforts For Citizen Scientists

Abstract

The AAVSO's Citizen Sky project encourages participants not just to collect and categorize data, but instead to critically analyze and publish research findings. Our participants form teams of different, yet complementary skills that work together towards a common goal. Each team has a leader and a professional astronomer assigned to act as an advisor. In this work we explore the formation of teams, by what means they find research topics, and how they manage their collaborations. We acknowledge support from the NSF Informal Science Education Division under grant DRL-0840188, to the AAVSO and the University of Denver.