Billion Brain Blog

This weekend, New York will have its first Science Hack Day. It will take place at ITP, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Programme, in collaboration with CUSP, NYU’s new Center for Urban Science and Progress. How did this event – a completely novel format for World Science Festival – come about?

Three years ago, I had never heard of the term hackfest. I was a scientist. I went to conferences, workshops and symposia. But never hackfests. Then something happened. I got a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation.

That Fellowship opened up my mind to new ways of developing technology. I met with other Fellows who were putting open source software to novel uses in education and government. And what I heard from these people was talk of hackfests, hackathons, bar camps, code sprints and un-conferences. Of people spontaneously meeting up, sometimes just a few, sometimes dozens, and working together, rather than lecturing each other. Building useful things, rather than just talking about them. It seemed bewildering: how can people just spontaneously figure out what to do? Don’t you need detailed agendas? Keynote speakers? Panel sessions? Chairpersons? Speaker bios?

Apparently not. If the theme is interesting enough – and on the Internet, there’s always someone out there interested in what you want to do – then people will come and make neat stuff together. Ok, a little promotion helps. But it’s surprising how powerful word-of-mouth can be on the Web. And although the concept of hackfest – a couple of intense days working on making some code better – comes from Silicon Valley and the culture of software developers, turns out it can be used for science, too, with just a few slight tweaks.

Over the last three years, thanks to my Shuttleworth Fellowship, I’ve helped organized a dozen science hackfests. In places as exotic as Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Cape Town, Geneva, London and yes, even in New York. But this is the first Science Hack Day I’m involved in, a model of hackfest developed by San Francisco based science-hacker Ariel Waldman, which is geared for an altogether larger scale than anything I’ve experienced before.

Over 200 have signed up so far for the event (there may still be a few last-minute free tickets online!). So it is with some trepidation that I look forward to seeing who turns up on Saturday morning, when ITP’s Clay Shirky kicks off the event with a “pitching session” where anyone with a good idea – not just our invited crew – can shout out about it and try to get a science hack going.

Budding scientists getting ready for Science Hack Day NYC – future Galileos, perhaps?

Whatever happens – if only twenty come, or if all 200 turn up – we’ll be ready. Thanks in part to the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’ve been able to invite an impressive line-up of scientists who have some great ideas for hacks they can do. Everything from genetics to particle physics. And we’ve got lots of food and caffeinated drinks to keep everyone hacking along through the entire event – though we’ll break for a little sleep Saturday night.

Since a strong theme of the event is “citizen science”, participants don’t need to be geeky software developers to help. (Although we’re counting on a fair number of those turning up!) Citizen science needs lots of skills: writers, designers, people to test out stuff, to comment on the clarity of explanations so that other citizens will be able to contribute. Above all, though participants need is a passion for science, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and help. Oh, and a laptop will come in handy, too! No need to stick to one topic all weekend, and there will be several “pop-up workshops” to entertain and instruct participants in technologies like 3D printing and balloon mapping.

What will come out of the event? We have a panel of distinguished judges – Beth Noveck, head of Govlab; ITP’s Tom Igoe, co-founder of Arduino; Steve Koonin, director of CUSP – who will review the results of the hacks and give out prizes to the teams that have shown the most creativity in a number of dimensions: science, technology, design, social impact. And of course, the crowd will get to vote for a winner, too.

That’s the end of the event. But with the help of CUSP, ITP and WSF, I certainly hope that this will not be the end of some of the projects, and that this first Science Hack Day will stimulate a new wave of citizen scientists in New York.

“Astronomical Find by Three Average Joes” was the title of a news item that accompanied a major discovery about pulsars, published in Science in 2010. The discovery was due to a project called Einstein@home which involves volunteers and their computers helping to analyze data from radio-telescopes.

It was a catchy title, for sure. But it was also profoundly misleading. Terms like “average Joes”, “general public”, “ordinary citizens” and “the man in the street” fail to capture the skills and passion that many volunteers bring to citizen science projects. For similar reasons, I’m averse to the term “crowdsourcing” in the context of citizen science, with its connotations of cheap labour and menial tasks.

Crowdcrafting vs. Crowdsourcing

It’s been exactly a year since I tweeted the term crowdcrafting as a better description of what volunteers do in citizen science projects, which distinguishes them from participants in commercial crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower. At about the same time I stopped blogging, unconvinced that my posts were serving any useful purpose.

A lot has happened in a year. Crowdcrafting has gone from being just a word, to a rapidly expanding open source platform for citizen science. I’ve been started teaching crowdcrafting in various guises at NYU’s ITP - the Centre for the Recently Possible. I’ve helped launch an EC project called CItizen Cyberlab that explores precisely the sort of volunteer-based learning and creativity that distinghuishes crowdcrafting from crowdsourcing. And I’ve started writing a book about crowdcrafting with ITP alumnus Yasser Ansari, the founder of Project Noah.

For these reasons, as well as a trickle of positive feedback about prior posts, I’ve decided to revive this Billion Brain Blog. Over the next days and weeks, I’ll be explaining what I mean by crowdcrafting and how much it differs from common perceptions of crowdsourcing.

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Part of this exercise will be descriptive – looking at projects that illustrate crowdcrafting well and interviewing people who are outstanding proponents of the concept. Part of this will be prescriptive – exploring how far crowdcrafting can go in theory and in practice, and what this might mean for the future of citizen science.

A good place to start is by summarizing how I stumbled on the crowdcrafting concept in the first place. This is not one of those stories of individual struggle and inspiration. Rather, and quite fittingly, this is the result of many people and ideas converging together. Scientists often like to talk about serendipity, which is basically just a fancy word for a lucky discovery. But the metaphor that comes to my mind is collage: pasting together a coherent picture from random parts. And the driving force for this collage, as I’ll describe in my next post, was a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation.

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* When I wrote the title for this post, I was thinking of the famous quote by Newton about seeing further, because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. I could also remember reading somewhere that the quote was actually a jibe at a short-statured rival. I assumed that must have been Leibniz.

It’s fitting that I learned all this thanks to the combined wisdom of Wikipedia contributors and editors, many of whom no doubt spent countless hours tracking down this quote and its various origins. Nietzsche notwithstanding, I believe we live in an age where, thanks to the Internet, we can all see further by sitting on the shoulders of average Joes. And what we learn from the perspicacity and perseverance that volunteers bring to initiatives like Wikipedia, as well as myriad citizen science projects, is that no Joe is really average.