Culture

Making a contribution

Since the project began thousands of people have made a contribution to the Old Weather project. Researchers from UCL have conducted in depth research about the motivations of these Old Weather volunteers.

Many of these contributors have made a small number of contributions, however there are a core of highly active volunteers who have been engaged with Old Weather for a number of years.

The Old Weather volunteers that we spoke to demonstrated a strong sense of social responsibility, and a desire to make a contribution to climate science through their work on the project:

“I’ve got a concern for the planet, you know, and the way that we treat it and so on. And so actually doing something that was in some way going to contribute to that kind of research attracted me. That was definitely the initial thing. I was thinking this is an amazing source of information, you know, all these logs, but there’s no way of getting at them unless people get in there and do it because computers can’t read the writing.”

“I mean to my mind the name of the game is trying to find out what’s going on with the climate.”

“I’m trying to do my bit [for climate change]. When I wasn’t transcribing I did feel a bit guilty.”

Volunteers took pride in the quality and accuracy of the contributions they made:

“The handwriting varies enormously. That’s definitely one of the main frustrations is just trying to decipher what it is, and trying to make sure, particularly with the weather records that you’re as accurate as possible.”

Recognition

We observed on the forums that volunteers responded enthusiastically when their contributions were recognised by climate scientists, for example when climate scientists talked about specific projects that were using their data.

One post from a volunteer reported a recent teleconference at which a number of well known climate scientists said “some wonderful things” about the Old Weather community. Their work was identified as being “extremely helpful to data analysis” and making climate scientists “job[s] very much easier”.

The project as a whole was identified as having “changed worldwide perceptions of how to recover old data in many fields” and the volunteers were told that they “should be very proud of what [they] have achieved.” The forum community was very pleased to hear their work was so appreciated and useful:

“It helps to get you through the inevitable tedious bits to know that the work is appreciated and used by the experts.” (#2)

“Sometimes you wonder what’s happening to all the work... then you get a report like this and you KNOW what you’re doing is right. Thanks so much for this report and to all the others in the system that we rarely see/hear from.” (#3)

“Thanks for sharing this, Janet. It’s great to know that what we’ve worked our way towards has really changed perceptions of what volunteers can achieve.” (#4)

“WOW! I knew our work was useful, but I didn’t know it was THAT useful!” (#6)

Productive leisure

The core contributors we spoke to both had free time that they were able to dedicate to leisure activities. The Old Weather project was perceived by them to be a productive form of recreation to engage in:

“I mean it tends to be something I do in the evening when I’m listening to the radio. It goes very well with Radio 4. So I’ll do that and I can be doing something, you know, sort of productive at the same time. So it’s basically a sort of leisure time activity... It’s not just purely you know, passing the time if you like. It’s contributing something useful, but it’s also interesting and educational, and you know, kind of community building and, yes all sorts of things.”

“I thought, do you know I’ve been meaning to do some citizen science for a long time, just on the basis of, you know, there’s a computer sat at home, it’s doing nothing, I have some spare time. Well, you could probably call some spare time, why not give it a go.”

Community

The Old Weather project online forum acts as a community hub where members of the project congregate to discuss and find humour both in their Old Weather transcribing and their wider lives:

“I think it’s quite a remarkable place, and I think it’s probably quite a large part of what keeps most of the hard core interested and whatever. You know because it’s not just you sitting at your computer in isolation transcribing away, you know it’s also actually relating to other people who are doing it.”

“It’s really nice to know that there’s somebody else out there who kind of cares for you as part of the party.”

“In the chat thread someone has just announced the birth of his first child, for example, one of the transcribers [laughs]. And we have that quite a bit you know, people are telling each other about important things in their lives, or that they’re going off on holiday so they won’t be around for a bit, but they’ll put some photographs up when they come back, and this kind of thing.

“So it’s got a real kind of community sense, as well as being a very useful source of can anybody read this writing, does anybody know what’s happening here.”

The community was also enthusiastic about publicly recognising one another’s contributions. The quotes below are a series of posts on the Old Weather Forum in response to the publication of a blog post written by community members:

“Good job, you two.” (#390)

“Wow :) Job here lots of hard work. Way to go everyone!” (#391)

“Impressive job combining all those logs!” (#392)

“Great job!” (#393)

“Tour de Force – congratulations to all involved. It is a great blog. Brought a tear to my eye.” (#394)

“Thanks for collating the logs.” (#395)

“I did love the way Caro interweaved the nine logs. Impressive.” (#396)

“Wow, this is both impressive and fascinating.” (#397)

“Brilliant bit of weaving together the logs.” (#398)

Historical connection

For some of the volunteers it was the historical context of the data they were transcribing that captured their interest and motivated their daily work on the project. Some of the Old Weather volunteers experienced a strong sense of connection with the crews of the ships taking the observations they were transcribing.

“On one of the ships I was on... the number of the sick list kept going up, and of course it was the influenza epidemic. And I remember realising that I was really quite anxious about this ship and this crew. I was thinking this is silly, you know, this is all a very long time ago, whatever’s happened has happened.

“But I realised I was really getting quite anxious about my crew, and you know, hoping that they were all going to, you know, having come through the war that they were actually going to come through the flu epidemic.”

“I’m very moved by the fact that having battled to sink the German ships, they then go all out to pick up survivors.” – Contribution to the Old Weather Forum

Vulnerability

Whilst the Old Weather community is strong and their work is recognised as valuable by many climate scientists, members demonstrated a keen awareness of the project’s vulnerability. Relying on voluntary labour means the project is dependent upon keeping the intrinsic motivation of participants high.

The factors discussed above contribute to this process, however there have been periods in the project’s history where this motivation has been lower. For example, when the project shifted from transcribing Royal Navy ships to American vessels and lost a lot of volunteers.

“I think we were on a knife edge at that particular moment, it was very scary. We did lose a lot of people who decided that actually, the whole thing meant so much to them that to cut and run was probably the only sensible way to deal with it. There’s people like me who actually can’t imagine life without it.

“Somehow we got ourselves through that, and I mean I realised early on what we’d done, and I think then it was a case of everybody trying to be as jolly as they could, keep the things goings, lauding the work that we were doing so far. Picking up interesting things from the American ships to try and make them look as interesting as the Royal Naval ones had been.”

Despite this vulnerability, the Old Weather project holds strong and the volunteers continue to make a significant contribution to climate science.