The workshop will showcase a number of pathfinder projects for transient and variable star astrophysics recently deployed on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. Workshop speakers will describe how these projects can begin to address the needs of next generation astronomical surveys through use of new functionalities developed by Zooniverse. These new functionalities include improvements in a citizen scientist’s ability to interact with the data and simplify the extraction of scientific information from Zooniverse. In addition, new tools exist for more efficient allocation of volunteer attention through smart task assignment functionalities enabling faster data processing and the ability to prioritize volunteer effort. The workshop will also focus on the specific challenges of transient lightcurve classification in the context of LSST. Speakers will show recent work to benchmark existing approaches and seek to stimulate discussion of new approaches, combining both citizen scientists and machine learning, to tackle the challenges of processing large volumes of sparsely sampled light curves while maintaining the opportunity for serendipitous discoveries and the study of rare transients.