  Personal science is the practice of addressing personally relevant health
questions through self-research. Implementing personal science can be
challenging, due to the need to develop and adopt research protocols, tools,
and methods. While online communities can provide valuable peer support, tools
for systematically accessing community knowledge are lacking. The objective of
this study is to apply a participatory design process involving a community of
personal science practitioners to develop a peer-produced knowledge base that
supports the needs of practitioners as consumers and contributors of knowledge.
The process led to the development of the Personal Science Wiki, an open
repository for documenting and accessing individual self-tracking projects
while facilitating the establishment of consensus knowledge. After initial
design iterations and a field testing phase, we performed a user study with 21
participants to test and improve the platform, and to explore suitable
information architectures. The study deepened our understanding of barriers to
scaling the personal science community, established an infrastructure for
knowledge management actively used by the community, and provided lessons on
challenges, information needs, representations, and architectures to support
individuals with their personal health inquiries
