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News

We Are Still here

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These are strange times we live in. With many people ill or worried, and communities all over the world in lockdown or cutting out social contact in order to try and control the spread of the novel coronavirus, it’s hard to work out what the future holds.

The Zooniverse team – including our teams in Oxford and in Chicago – are all working from home, and we’re struggling to master how to communicate and work in this odd situation. So far we’ve encountered all sorts of weird glitches while trying to keep in touch.

Zoom backgrounds can be weird and terrifying, as demonstrated here by Sam.
Why am I the only one with a profile picture?

But we are still here! As we know lots of you are turning to Zooniverse for a distraction while your lives are disrupted, we’ve asked our research teams to pay particular attention to their projects and to be even more present online during this time. We’ll try and bring you more news from them over the next few weeks.

Anyway, if any of you would like to distract yourselves by taking part and contributing to one of our projects, we’ve made it easier to find a new project to dive into. The top of our projects page now highlights selected projects – they will change frequently, and might be topical, timely, particularly in need of your help – or just our favourites!

Zooniverse projects succeed because they’re the collective work of many thousands of you who come together to collaborate with our research teams – and a little bit of collective action in the world right now feels pretty good.

Look after yourselves, and see you in the Zooniverse.

Chris

News, Zoo Planning

Got An Idea for a Zooniverse Project? Propose One

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For more than a year, we’ve been openly accepting proposals for new Zooniverse projects and this has brought to life projects such as Seafloor Explorer, Snapshot Serengeti, Notes from Nature and Space Warps.

Yesterday, five Zooniverse projects were featured in The Biologist’s 10 Great Citizen Science Projects – several of them were ideas proposed by researchers we had never met before they came to us and said ‘hey, I have a cool idea for a project‘. We’ve also recently seen articles about how the Zooniverse might be able to help in a crisis and how we provide an excellent avenue for proactive procrastination. Citizen science projects are wide and varied and lots of researchers have great ideas.

So this is a good time to remind everyone that we want to hear from researchers with ideas for Zooniverse projects. If that’s you: propose a project! We have funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to build your great ideas and work with you to further science. We also have an incredibly talented team of designers, developers, educators and researchers who want to make your idea into an awesome new Zooniverse project.

If you want to know more about this, you can get in touch with any of the team or via our general email address or on Twitter @the_zooniverse. We’re currently working on projects that were proposed earlier this year and we’ll be announcing them soon. Maybe yours will be next?