  Online Citizen Science platforms are good examples of socio-technical systems
where technology-enabled interactions occur between scientists and the general
public (volunteers). Citizen Science platforms usually host multiple Citizen
Science projects, and allow volunteers to choose the ones to participate in.
Recent work in the area has demonstrated a positive feedback loop between
participation and learning and creativity in Citizen Science projects, which is
one of the motivating factors both for scientists and the volunteers. This
emphasises the importance of creating successful Citizen Science platforms,
which support this feedback process, and enable enhanced learning and
creativity to occur through knowledge sharing and diverse participation. In
this paper, we discuss how scientists' and volunteers' motivation and
participation influence the design of Citizen Science platforms. We present our
summary as guidelines for designing these platforms as user-inspired
socio-technical systems. We also present the case-studies on popular Citizen
Science platforms, including our own CitizenGrid platform, developed as part of
the CCL EU project, as well as Zooniverse, World Community Grid, CrowdCrafting
and EpiCollect+ to see how closely these platforms follow our proposed
guidelines and how these may be further improved to incorporate the creativity
enabled by the collective knowledge sharing.
