Alice Sheppard began running the first discussion forum for Galaxy Zoo, the citizen science project with 300,000 members worldwide which contributed to many academic papers in which “ordinary” citizens were listed as authors or acknowledged for their contributions, and which led to the vastly successful Zooniverse. Under Alice’s leadership, the forum became ‘the politest place on the Internet’, where astronomical questions were answered, people taught each other how to use databases and astronomical spectra, and various new astronomical objects were discovered. She is keen to create similar supportive, diverse communities in other projects, in which everyone’s contribution is important, and gives regular talks about citizen science and astronomy. She writes the Citizen Science column for the Society for Popular Astronomy magazine.
