Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [79]
How Much Will Citizen Science Change Science?
Examples such as Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and the open dinosaur project are interesting and fun. But science is vast, and while citizen science is likely to grow rapidly in the years and decades ahead, that does not mean that it will come to be a dominant part of how science is done. Although projects such as Galaxy Zoo are important, it’s not obvious whether they’re curiosities or harbingers of a broader change in science. Will citizen science ever have a broad and decisive impact on how science is done? Or is it destined to be useful mainly in a few particular corners of science? I don’t know the answer to these questions. We’ve only just begun exploring the ways online tools can expand the impact of citizen science. The situation is quite different from the changes described in the last chapter. There, as we saw, powerful new tools for finding meaning in knowledge are already revolutionizing many parts of science. As yet, the prospects for citizen science are more uncertain. But although we can’t know for sure how important citizen science will ultimately be, we can at least think a little more about its potential, where it might be applied, and what its limitations might be.
Part of that potential is to create supportive and stimulating communities for citizen science. Before the internet, most citizen scientists worked largely on their own, isolated from the encouragement and criticism of colleagues. Today, that’s changing. In the Galaxy Zoo forums you see a community where people help out one another, a supportive environment in which they can learn and grow as astronomers, a place where people can ask questions and other people will answer in a friendly way. Consider, for example, the way the Zooites helped each other in their quest to understand the green pea galaxies. They repeatedly critiqued and improved one another’s ideas about what made the green peas unique, egging one another on, sharing tidbits about problems such as how best to analyze a galaxy’s spectrum, or how to do database queries to automatically find green peas in the SDSS data. When you’re in a community like that, you’re getting constant feedback that says, in effect, “Hey, this is important, this is what really matters.” Think of the way children play soccer or baseball in streets and parks—they play tirelessly, hour after hour, day after day, gradually getting better as part of a community that both demands their best, and makes reaching it a joy. All the most creative communities do the same.
This new type of community building is important, but today’s citizen science projects have a great deal of room for improvement. Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and most other citizen science projects don’t yet have the kind of structured stepping stones of development and mentorship available to professional scientists, stepping stones that help those scientists acquire the broad base of knowledge required for many types of scientific work. It will be interesting to see how citizen science projects evolve. Will we see ever more effective learning environments, a place where amateurs can learn as they go, gradually acquiring more expertise? Will we see systems of mentorship emerge, giving people a structured way of learning? Imagine online communities built around virtual seminar series and conferences, online question-and-answer sessions, and discussion groups. These and other ideas can be used to create a demanding and rewarding online community supporting citizen science.
The biggest citizen science projects have recruited large numbers of people—Galaxy Zoo has more than