Ensuring data integrity and user retention within BANDIT

Abstract

Data collection is a vital service completed by the government to help ensure accuracy on a range of issues. Currently the Bird Banding Lab (BBL) is tasked with the collection of bird migratory data across North America. Data collection by the BBL is vital to the continued implementation of policies and regulations that affect far reaching sectors such as the environment, economy, and healthcare. In order to collect data sets of the magnitude that the BBL is mandated to do a large-scale citizen science program has been created, by crowdsourcing data from a large group of users who voluntarily submit data. While crowdsourcing has been proven to be a powerful tool it does not come without its own set of issues, in particular keeping participants engaged and keeping data accurate. This paper user research to examine the issues plaguing the BANDIT system and attempts to provide solutions on how the organization should address these issues