[open-geodata] An analogy

Fri Apr 20 20:28:41 UTC 2012

On 20 April 2012 16:24, Jo Walsh <jo.walsh at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> I've been working on a piece that i'd like to contribute to the @okfn blog, when it's ready. It started out as a fairly straightforward attempt to answer Charles Arthur's question on "Twitter" - "will this Open Access / 'academic spring' discussion end up going the same way as Free Our Data/ Open Geodata?"
>
> http://okfnpad.org/analogy

Really interesting Jo -- thought provoking as always.

> I try to say things like "it does not look the same yet because there is no moral equivalent of OSM", then veer off into a lengthy criticism of the Zooniverse with which i feel quite pleased.
>
> If anyone felt like reading this early draft and offering comments, I'd be happy with that!

<quote>
The academics organise events themed on Citizen Cyber-Science and
attempt to set up projects that look like the successful Galaxy Zoo.
Research broken up into small, bite-size, Amazon Mechanical Turk
tasks, that the peons can accomplish. Different simple ways of
harvesting our pattern-recognition intelligence in a fairly brute way.
For the results to be processed, anaysed and interpreted for the most
part by traditional means.
</quote>

My feeling from talking with Francois Grey and others involved in
Citizen Cyberscience community (I can't speak for Galaxy Zoo /
Zooniverse folks that much) is that it quite the opposite of this: the
primary thing that gets them excited is the idea of getting a wider
community, and especially "average" citizens, engaged and excited in
science -- not the ability to get free labour from the "masses". The
creation of "crowd-sourcing" platforms for them is just because that
is one major way to give people an engaging way to do digital science.

Aside: along with Francois Grey and colleagues at the Citizen
Cyberscience Centre we've been building since last November (when it
started at Citizen Science hackday in Cape Town) an open-source
"crowd-sourcing" platform called PyBossa (http://pybossa.com/) --
source code at <https://github.com/PyBossa/pybossa>.

PyBossa is a "free, open-source, platform for creating and running
crowd-sourcing applications that utilise online assistance in
performing tasks that require human cognition, knowledge or
intelligence such as image classification, transcription, geocoding
and more!"

Rufus