Planet hunters and seafloor explorers

Making visible the process of user participation in online crowdsourced initiatives has been shown to help new users understand the norms of participation 2. However, in many settings, participants lack full access to others' work. Merging the theory of legitimate peripheral participation 18 with Erickson and Kellogg's theory of social translucence 10, 11, 16 we introduce the concept of practice proxies: traces of user participation in online environments that act as resources to orient newcomers towards the norms of practice. Through a combination of virtual 14 and trace ethnography 12 we explore how new users in two online citizen science projects engage with these traces of practice as a way of compensating for a lack of access to the process of the work itself. Our findings suggest that newcomers seek out practice proxies in the social features of the projects that highlight contextualized and specific characteristics of primary work practice.