Build citizen science projects: a demonstration of the Zooniverse Project Builder tool

With the ever growing volume of astronomical and planetary data, generated both by ground- and space-based telescopes and also from focused remote sensing missions, there is a need for more robust processing pipelines that can accurately produce meaningful outputs quickly. Citizen science is an efficient and versatile tool to solve this issue, where the data are presented to the public with simple but focused processing tasks. In this way, processed data and scientific outputs are generated quickly, especially when combined with machine learning based approaches, while simultaneously engaging the public directly with scientific research. The Zooniverse is one of the most successful online citizen science platforms with over 2.5 million volunteers worldwide and over 100 active projects across many scientific disciplines. Example projects related to planetary science are: Jovian Vortex Hunter, Cloudspotting on Mars, Rosetta Zoo and Active Asteroids, with many more successfully completed. To facilitate researchers in creating citizen science projects, Zooniverse provides a free project builder (zooniverse.org/lab) which allows any research team to host their data on Zooniverse and build workflows for citizen science volunteers. Since the launch of the Project Builder in 2015, Zooniverse has gone from launching 3-5 projects per year to nearly one project per week. In this talk, we will showcase the project builder and demonstrate the simplicity of creating a Zooniverse citizen science project in the context of planetary science data. We will also highlight the types of tasks supported by the Project Builder and best practices for engaging the public in scientific research through Zooniverse.