Crowd-sourced science

Incoming

• LIMN magazine on crowds and clouds

Open source science

Every Bug is Shallow if One of Your Readers is an Entomologist:

Research is difficult because reality is complex and many things are confusing or mysterious. But with enough eyeballs, all research bugs are shallow too.

Without a huge research budget and dozens of managers, you won’t be able to coordinate a ton of researchers. But the good news is, you didn’t really want to coordinate everyone anyways. You can just open the gates and let people get to work. It works fine for software!

Crowdsourced competitions

Another paradigm for crowdsourcing is to gamify science. That is not my jam; I feel that participants deserve a better stake than only twiddling their dopamine system and the incentives of recruiting that way are not ideal — scientists’ games will not be as fun as real game company’s highly evolved games, and the participants we can recruit for addictive behaviour are probably invested in a suboptimal manner for our goals.

• Game theory of crowdsourced competition
• Crowd sourcing competitions encourage malicious behaviour

Tools

Software frameworks for data collection: (Thanks Dan Pagendam for the tip.)

• ODK-X
• ODK - Collect data anywhere

References