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What platform are we talking about?

Public Lab aims to empower people to address environmental justice issues through community science and open technology. They focus on the collaborative development, sharing, reuse and adaption of DIY scientific tools.

Why do you mean by granularity and modularity and why is it important for peer production websites?

Tasks should be broken down into modules of different size/granularity, so that users can contribute anything from tiny edits to e.g. a complete new feature for a software. This is important to attract contributors with different skills and backgrounds and to match varying amounts of time and motivation (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2021). Small and easy modules are also a good way to encourage newcomers to contribute.

How does Public Lab implement granularity and modularity?

On Public Lab, a wide range of tasks, from the identification of research questions to conceptualizing and conducting research projects can be performed on the platform. Users are free to use, adapt and contribute to resources according to their particular needs, according to Public Labs perception of science as a creative, open-ended process (Breen et al., 2019). The granularity of tasks is high: It is possible to perform small tasks, like editing minor parts in wiki documents or commenting on another user’s artifacts, but also to replicate research approaches or to plan and conduct whole research projects from start to finish.

There are numerous ways in which people can build on the artifacts other users created. For example, there are wiki pages for topics or projects that can be edited by anyone, and users are encouraged to reinvent existing DIY tools for their own purposes by replicating existing activity artifacts. These activities mainly contain instruction manuals for building and using DIY research tools (see here for an overview). On activity pages, thanks to a tagging system, there is also a list of links to all replications of the respective activity. Users who tried an activity themselves are invited to click the “I did this” button on the original activity’s page and add their own experiences in form of a new activity or a comment, in order to give general feedback or feedback for their use case. In the comment sections, when users ask a question, a link saying “Is this a question?” appears, which allows anyone to transfer a question in the comments section to a question artifact, which makes it appear on topic pages and can mark the beginning of a research project.

References

• Public Lab website
• Content partly taken from: Kloppenborg, K., Ball, M. P., & Greshake Tzovaras, B. (2021, May 23). Peer Production Practices: Design Strategies in Online Citizen Science Platforms. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/rw58y
• Breen, J., Dosemagen, S., Blair, D., & Barry, L. (2019). Public laboratory: Play and civic engagement. The Playful Citizen, 162.
• Kostakis, V., & Bauwens, M. (2021). Grammar of Peer Production. The Handbook of Peer Production, 19-32.