“citizenscience.gov is an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government. The site provides a portal to three key components for federal practitioners: a searchable catalog of federally supported citizen science projects, a toolkit to assist with designing and maintaining projects, and a gateway to a community of practice to share best practices.
Citizen Science and the Flint Water Crisis
The Wilson Center’s Commons Lab: “In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan decided to switch its water supply source from the Detroit water system to a cheaper alternative, the Flint River. But in exchange for the cheaper price tag, the Flint residents paid a greater price with one of the worst public health crises of the past decade.
Despite concerns from Flint citizens about the quality of the water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly attributed the problem to the plumbing system. It was 37-year-old mother of four, LeeAnne Walters who, after noticing physical and behavioral changes in her children and herself, set off a chain of events that exposed the national scandal. Eventually, with the support of Dr. Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech (VT), Walters discovered lead concentration levels of 13,200 parts per billion in her water, 880 times the maximum concentration allowed by law and more than twice the level the Environmental Protection Agency considers to be hazardous waste.
Citizen science emerged as an important piece of combating the Flint water crisis. Alarmed by the government’s neglect and the health issues spreading all across Flint, Edwards and Walters began the Flint Water Study, a collaboration between the Flint residents and research team from VT. Using citizen science, the VT researchers provided the Flint residents with kits to sample and test their homes’ drinking water and then analyzed the results to unearth the truth behind Flint’s water quality.
The citizen-driven project illustrates the capacity for nonprofessional scientists to use science in order to address problems that directly affect themselves and their community. While the VT team needed the Flint residents to provide water samples, the Flint residents in turn needed the VT team to conduct the analysis. In short, both parties achieved mutually beneficial results and the partnership helped expose the scandal. Surprisingly, the “traditional” problems associated with citizen science, including the inability to mobilize the local constituent base and the lack of collaboration between citizens and professional scientists, were not the obstacles in Flint….(More)”
How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported
Ari Beser at National Geographic: “It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was a chance after the disaster for humanity to innovate our thinking about energy, and that doesn’t seem like it’s happened. But what we can change is the way we measure the environment around us.”
Franken and his founding partners found a way to turn their email chain, spurred by the tsunami, into Safecast; an open-source network that allows everyday people to contribute to radiation-monitoring.
“We literally started the day after the earthquake happened,” revealed Pieter. “A friend of mine, Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, and I were basically talking about what Geiger counter to get. He was in Boston at the time and I was here in Tokyo, and like the rest of the world, we were worried, but we couldn’t get our hands on anything. There’s something happening here, we thought. Very quickly as the disaster developed, we wondered how to get the information out. People were looking for information, so we saw that there was a need. Our plan became: get information, put it together and disseminate it.”
An e-mail thread between Franken, Ito, and Sean Bonner, (co-founder of CRASH Space, a group that bills itself as Los Angeles’ first hackerspace), evolved into a network of minds, including members of Tokyo Hackerspace, Dan Sythe, who produced high-quality Geiger counters, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer. On April 15, the group that was to become Safecast sat down together for the first time. Ozzie conceived the plan to strap a Geiger counter to a car and somehow log measurements in motion. This would became the bGeigie, Safecast’s future model of the do-it-yourself Geiger counter kit.
Armed with a few Geiger counters donated by Sythe, the newly formed team retrofitted their radiation-measuring devices to the outside of a car. Safecast’s first volunteers drove up to the city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, and took their own readings around all of the schools. Franken explained, “If we measured all of the schools, we covered all the communities; because communities surround schools. It was very granular, the readings changed a lot, and the levels were far from academic, but it was our start. This was April 24, 6 weeks after the disaster. Our thinking changed quite a bit through this process.”
Since their first tour of Koriyama, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Safecast’s team of volunteers have developed the bGeigie handheld radiation monitor, that anyone can buy on Amazon.com and construct with suggested instructions available online. So far over 350 users have contributed 41 million readings, using around a thousand fixed, mobile, and crowd-sourced devices….(More)
Dive Against Debris: Employing 25,600 scuba divers to collect data
DataDrivenJournalism: “In 2011, the team at Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris program with the objective of better documenting the amount of marine debris found in the world’s oceans. This global citizen science program trains volunteer scuba divers from across the globe to conduct underwater surveys, generating quantitative data on the debris they see. After cleaning this data for quality assurance, it is then published on their interactive Dive Against Debris Map. This data and visualization informs the team’s advocacy work, ultimately seeking to generate changes in policy.
The impact of marine debris is devastating, killing marine life and changing their habitats and ecosystems. Animals are extremely vulnerable to ingestion or entanglement which leads to death, as they are unable to distinguish between what is trash and what is not.
Beyond this, as microscopic pieces of plastic enter the food chain, most seafood ingested by humans also likely contains marine debris.
Project AWARE is a growing movement of scuba divers protecting the ocean, with a long history of working on the marine debris issue. Through its work, the Project AWARE team found that there was a significant lack of data available regarding underwater marine debris.
To remedy this, the Dive Against Debris program was launched in 2011. The programs seeks to collect and visualise data generated by their volunteers, then use this data to influence policy changes and raise social awareness around the world. This data collection is unique in that it focuses exclusively on yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found beneath in the ocean, an issue Hannah Pragnell-Raasch, a Program Specialist with Project AWARE, told us “has previously been disregarded as out of sight, out of mind, as the everyday person is not exposed to the harmful impacts.”
To date, Dive Against Debris surveys have been conducted in over 50 countries, with the top reporting countries being the United States, Thailand and Greece. As more divers get involved with Dive Against Debris, Project AWARE continues to bring visibility to the problem of marine debris and helps to identify target areas for waste prevention efforts.
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Anyone can take part in a Dive Against Debris survey, as long as they are a certified diver. As described in their “Action Zone”, scuba divers can either “join” or “create” an action. To further support the program, Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris Distinctive Specialty, a course of divers, which “aims to equip students (scuba divers) with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct their own Dive Against Debris Surveys.”
Before the data appears on the interactive Dive Against Debris Map, it goes through a quality review in order to ensure data integrity. The survey leader at Project AWARE corrects any data inconsistencies. Then, as the focus is exclusively on what is found underwater, all land data is removed. Project AWARE Aware aims to create “an accurate perspective about underwater marine debris, that policy-makers simply cannot ignore”…. Explore the Dive Against Debris project here…. (More)
What Is Citizen Science? – A Scientometric Meta-Analysis
Christopher Kullenberg and Dick Kasperowski at PLOS One: “The concept of citizen science (CS) is currently referred to by many actors inside and outside science and research. Several descriptions of this purportedly new approach of science are often heard in connection with large datasets and the possibilities of mobilizing crowds outside science to assists with observations and classifications. However, other accounts refer to CS as a way of democratizing science, aiding concerned communities in creating data to influence policy and as a way of promoting political decision processes involving environment and health.
Objective
In this study we analyse two datasets (N = 1935, N = 633) retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) with the aim of giving a scientometric description of what the concept of CS entails. We account for its development over time, and what strands of research that has adopted CS and give an assessment of what scientific output has been achieved in CS-related projects. To attain this, scientometric methods have been combined with qualitative approaches to render more precise search terms.
Results
Results indicate that there are three main focal points of CS. The largest is composed of research on biology, conservation and ecology, and utilizes CS mainly as a methodology of collecting and classifying data. A second strand of research has emerged through geographic information research, where citizens participate in the collection of geographic data. Thirdly, there is a line of research relating to the social sciences and epidemiology, which studies and facilitates public participation in relation to environmental issues and health. In terms of scientific output, the largest body of articles are to be found in biology and conservation research. In absolute numbers, the amount of publications generated by CS is low (N = 1935), but over the past decade a new and very productive line of CS based on digital platforms has emerged for the collection and classification of data….(More)”
Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems
Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.
These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.
Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.
Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).
Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.
This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.
“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.
HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”
Tech and Innovation to Re-engage Civic Life
Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Sometimes even the best-intentioned policymakers overlook the power of people. And even the best-intentioned discussions on social impact and leveraging big data for the social sector can obscure the power of every-day people in their communities.
But time and time again, I’ve seen the transformative power of civic engagement when initiatives are structured well. For example, the other year I witnessed a high school student walk into a school auditorium one evening during Boston’s first-ever youth-driven participatory budgeting project. Participatory budgeting gives residents a structured opportunity to work together to identify neighborhood priorities, work in tandem with government officials to draft viable projects, and prioritize projects to fund. Elected officials in turn pledge to implement these projects and are held accountable to their constituents. Initially intrigued by an experiment in democracy (and maybe the free pizza), this student remained engaged over several months, because she met new members of her community; got to interact with elected officials; and felt like she was working on a concrete objective that could have a tangible, positive impact on her neighborhood.
For many of the young participants, ages 12-25, being part of a participatory budgeting initiative is the first time they are involved in civic life. Many were excited that the City of Boston, in collaboration with the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, empowered young people with the opportunity to allocate $1 million in public funds. Through participating, young people gain invaluable civic skills, and sometimes even a passion that can fuel other engagements in civic and communal life.
This is just one example of a broader civic and social innovation trend. Across the globe, people are working together with their communities to solve seemingly intractable problems, but as diverse as those efforts are, there are also commonalities. Well-structured civic engagement creates the space and provides the tools for people to exert agency over policies. When citizens have concrete objectives, access to necessary technology (whether it’s postcards, trucks, or open data portals), and an eye toward outcomes, social change happens.
Using Technology to Distribute Expertise
Technology is allowing citizens around the world to participate in solving local, national, and global problems. When it comes to large, public bureaucracies, expertise is largely top-down and concentrated. Leveraging technology creates opportunities for people to work together in new ways to solve public problems. One way is through civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor.com, which cities can use to develop public sector projects for citizen support; several cities in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Philadelphia have successfully pooled citizen resources to fund new public works. Another way is through citizen science. Old Weather, a crowdsourcing project from the National Archives and Zooniverse, enrolls people to transcribe old British ship logs to identify climate change patterns. Platforms like these allow anyone to devote a small amount of time or resources toward a broader public good. And because they have a degree of transparency, people can see the progress and impact of their efforts. ….(More)”
How Big Data is Helping to Tackle Climate Change
Bernard Marr at DataInformed: “Climate scientists have been gathering a great deal of data for a long time, but analytics technology’s catching up is comparatively recent. Now that cloud, distributed storage, and massive amounts of processing power are affordable for almost everyone, those data sets are being put to use. On top of that, the growing number of Internet of Things devices we are carrying around are adding to the amount of data we are collecting. And the rise of social media means more and more people are reporting environmental data and uploading photos and videos of their environment, which also can be analyzed for clues.
Perhaps one of the most ambitious projects that employ big data to study the environment is Microsoft’s Madingley, which is being developed with the intention of creating a simulation of all life on Earth. The project already provides a working simulation of the global carbon cycle, and it is hoped that, eventually, everything from deforestation to animal migration, pollution, and overfishing will be modeled in a real-time “virtual biosphere.” Just a few years ago, the idea of a simulation of the entire planet’s ecosphere would have seemed like ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky thinking. But today it’s something into which one of the world’s biggest companies is pouring serious money. Microsoft is doing this because it believes that analytical technology has finally caught up with the ability to collect and store data.
Another data giant that is developing tools to facilitate analysis of climate and ecological data is EMC. Working with scientists at Acadia National Park in Maine, the company has developed platforms to pull in crowd-sourced data from citizen science portals such as eBird and iNaturalist. This allows park administrators to monitor the impact of climate change on wildlife populations as well as to plan and implement conservation strategies.
Last year, the United Nations, under its Global Pulse data analytics initiative, launched the Big Data Climate Challenge, a competition aimed to promote innovate data-driven climate change projects. Among the first to receive recognition under the program is Global Forest Watch, which combines satellite imagery, crowd-sourced witness accounts, and public datasets to track deforestation around the world, which is believed to be a leading man-made cause of climate change. The project has been promoted as a way for ethical businesses to ensure that their supply chain is not complicit in deforestation.
Other initiatives are targeted at a more personal level, for example by analyzing transit routes that could be used for individual journeys, using Google Maps, and making recommendations based on carbon emissions for each route.
The idea of “smart cities” is central to the concept of the Internet of Things – the idea that everyday objects and tools are becoming increasingly connected, interactive, and intelligent, and capable of communicating with each other independently of humans. Many of the ideas put forward by smart-city pioneers are grounded in climate awareness, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions and energy waste across urban areas. Smart metering allows utility companies to increase or restrict the flow of electricity, gas, or water to reduce waste and ensure adequate supply at peak periods. Public transport can be efficiently planned to avoid wasted journeys and provide a reliable service that will encourage citizens to leave their cars at home.
These examples raise an important point: It’s apparent that data – big or small – can tell us if, how, and why climate change is happening. But, of course, this is only really valuable to us if it also can tell us what we can do about it. Some projects, such as Weathersafe, which helps coffee growers adapt to changing weather patterns and soil conditions, are designed to help humans deal with climate change. Others are designed to tackle the problem at the root, by highlighting the factors that cause it in the first place and showing us how we can change our behavior to minimize damage….(More)”
Accelerating Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to Address Societal and Scientific Challenges
Tom Kalil et al at the White House Blog: “Citizen science encourages members of the public to voluntarily participate in the scientific process. Whether by asking questions, making observations, conducting experiments, collecting data, or developing low-cost technologies and open-source code, members of the public can help advance scientific knowledge and benefit society.
Through crowdsourcing – an open call for voluntary assistance from a large group of individuals – Americans can study and tackle complex challenges by conducting research at large geographic scales and over long periods of time in ways that professional scientists working alone cannot easily duplicate. These challenges include understanding the structure of proteins related viruses in order to support development of new medications, or preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters.
…OSTP is today announcing two new actions that the Administration is taking to encourage and support the appropriate use of citizen science and crowdsourcing at Federal agencies:
- OSTP Director John Holdren, is issuing a memorandum entitled Addressing Societal and Scientific Challenges through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing. This memo articulates principles that Federal agencies should embrace to derive the greatest value and impact from citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. The memo also directs agencies to take specific actions to advance citizen science and crowdsourcing, including designating an agency-specific coordinator for citizen science and crowdsourcing projects, and cataloguing citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that are open for public participation on a new, centralized website to be created by the General Services Administration: making it easy for people to find out about and join in these projects.
- Fulfilling a commitment made in the 2013 Open Government National Action Plan, the U.S. government is releasing the first-ever Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit to help Federal agencies design, carry out, and manage citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. The toolkit, which was developed by OSTP in partnership with the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science and GSA’s Open Opportunities Program, reflects the input of more than 125 Federal employees from over 25 agencies on ideas, case studies, best management practices, and other lessons to facilitate the successful use of citizen science and crowdsourcing in a Federal context….(More)”
Citizen Urban Science
New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?
This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”