Conducting Massively Open Online Social Experiments with Volunteer Science

Abstract

Volunteer Science is an online platform enabling anyone to participate in social science research. The goal of Volunteer Science is to build a thriving community of research participants and social science researchers for Massively Open Online Social Experiments (“MOOSEs”). The architecture of Volunteer Science has been built to be open to researchers, transparent to participants, and to facilitate the levels of concurrency needed for large scale social experiments. Since then, 14 experiments and 12 survey-based interventions have been developed and deployed, with subjects largely being recruited through paid advertising, word of mouth, social media, search, and Mechanical Turk. We are currently replicating several forms of social research to validate the platform, working with new collaborators, and developing new experiments. Moving forward our priorities are continuing to grow our user base, developing quality control processes and collaborators, diversifying our funding models, and creating novel research.