  The Galaxy Zoo citizen science website invites anyone with an Internet
connection to participate in research by classifying galaxies from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey. As of April 2009, more than 200,000 volunteers had made
more than 100 million galaxy classifications. In this paper, we present results
of a pilot study into the motivations and demographics of Galaxy Zoo
volunteers, and define a technique to determine motivations from free responses
that can be used in larger multiple-choice surveys with similar populations.
Our categories form the basis for a future survey, with the goal of determining
the prevalence of each motivation.
