Are citizen scientists the new 'women and minority' demographic?
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by JeanTate
I am starting this thread in order to kick off what I hope will be a good discussion.
First, a very important scope statement: this is not about Radio Galaxy Zoo!
While most of the examples I'll be giving come from various Zooniverse astronomy projects, I'm hoping this will not be limited to just those; rather, this is about the extent to which citizen scientists - of which zooites are just one 'brand' - are the new 'women and minority' demographic.
In my next post I'll be making a case that we, ordinary citizen scientist/zooites, are very much 'second class citizens' when it comes to acknowledging our abilities and work, as scientists. A bit like, in one respect, a tiny encounter a minority scientist (with a PhD) had, some decades ago (this is from memory, something I read in someone's biography, or similar): at a party for scientists working in some field or other, a (white) professor asked a (minority) PhD guy (yes, guy, not woman) to get him a glass of chardonnay ... as if he couldn't possibly be a colleague, just a servant! 😮
Stay tuned, and let the free discussion begin! 😃
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by JeanTate
I'd like to start by sketching reality (or some facet of it) for professionals; in particular astronomers. These are my own observations, based on what I have read, and talking to some relatives who are (were) professional scientists. Comments and corrections by any professional astronomer who reads this are most welcome!
Most, if not almost all, are employed by (or under some sort of contract with) a university or research institute (many of which are closely tied to a university or consortium thereof). Before becoming professionals, all had to get a PhD, mostly in astronomy or a closely related field. Recent professionals likely had to have several 'postdoc' jobs, as described by Brooke in a recent GZ blog post ("Go West, Young (?) Astronomer"). The life of a PhD student is the topic of many of the Piled Higher and Deeper comics.
There are very few secure, full-time positions, relative to the number of PhD students and postdocs; 'getting tenure' is a real watershed, and can take decades to achieve.
Most professionals work unbelievably hard, and much of their time is devoted to things other than research: for example, writing grant proposals, teaching (varies widely), mentoring students (esp PhDs), and squeezing in time outside 'work'. On the other hand, for almost all, this is a 'job to die for': getting paid to do what they truly love doing (scientific research). If they like traveling round the world, the job offers opportunities galore (see Kyle's recent blog post, "Galaxy Zoo is in Florida!").
In a perfect world, professionals who work on citizen science projects like those in the Zooniverse will have allocated time etc to engage with the ordinary zooites: writing blog posts, monitoring and writing Comments and Discussions, being the go-between (development/support team/zooites; we cannot interact with the dev team, except via GitHub), etc. In the real world, such time is often an after-thought, few on the Science Teams get such an allocation, and it has a much lower priority than almost all other 'job-related' activities.
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