Participant motivation to engage in a citizen science campaign: the case of the TESS network

Poster presented at ECSA Conference of a digital tool to investigate citizen science motivation to participate in CS projects.  We will illustrate the results of the quantitative and qualitative investigation within the TESS network. 

In this first case study, we are analysing the motivation of a specific citizen science community focused on fighting light pollution: the TESS network[1]. Volunteers of this network accept to host and install sensors to monitor sky brightness in order to collect data for measuring the level of light pollution in many areas of the Earth. The sensor, called TESS photometer (Telescope Encoder and Sky Sensor [8]), is a compact device to monitor sky brightness every night developed by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid within the Stars4All project[2], an H2020 project that created and spread awareness about light pollution. As of today, about 180 photometers are installed in Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe and Australia. All these measurements are periodically published in the STARS4ALL Zenodo Community[3] following the principles of open science.

[1] Cf. https://tess.stars4all.eu/network/

[2] Cf. https://stars4all.eu

[3] Cf. https://zenodo.org/communities/stars4all