Last week I attended
the 2nd Citizen Cyberscience Summit on behalf of my
employer, Ovum. It was probably the most exciting place I've been –
at least in a work context – for the last ten years. The conference
had been moved at the last minute to the Royal Geographical Society
to cope with the unexpected number of attendees, and it was buzzing
from the very beginning.
The crowd were mostly
young, with a preponderance of postgrads, though there were a few
greyheads too. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was fairly
evenly balanced between men and women – much more so than most of
the industry events that I attend. Everyone was really friendly, in
the kind of open smiley way that I usually associate with music
festivals. The discussions were lively and good-natured; I think I
only heard one tetchy comment across the entire three days.
The fact that I'm
writing this up now, having taking three days to digest, is of course
a reflection of my age. Most of the other participants were blogging
and tweeting as they went, as well as checking out the websites and
blogs of the presenters as they spoke.
There was a trend
towards the more weird and wonderful as the conference went on. The
first day included some fairly mainstream citizen science projects,
which were about crowd-sourcing effort and attention – using
wannabee-scientists to do some heavy lifting on science projects that
might otherwise be difficult to do. Examples included the rather
wonderful Oldweather.org, which is about getting historic weather
data for climate models. The data source is the logbooks of the Royal
Navy, since ships' captains recorded detailed observations (along
with time and position) every day of every voyage. The logbooks
themselves have been scanned, but the images are not susceptible to
machine reading – so volunteers do the reading and the data entry.
The reward for this are only symbolic, but the results are fantastic.
In one year 24,000 volunteers have transcribed 800,000 logbook pages.
Similar projects included Planet Hunters, and Stardust@home.
Interesting to note
that there were quite a few Israelis around – the conference was
organised by Mordechai “Muki” Haklay of UCL – and his
students, organised at the “Extreme Citizens Cyberscience network.
Ofer Arazy from the University of Alberta spoke about citizen science
as a peer production community, and invoked the spirit of another
Israeli, Yochai Benkler. On the second day I found myself sitting
next to Liora Malki-Epshtein, another lecturer from UCL. Given recent
discussions I've had with friends about what a self-centred,
materialistic and unequal society Israel is, I wondered whether the
interest in co-production is a sort of protest against the loss of an
earlier culture which was - at least ostensibly – committed to
equality, sacrifice and voluntary participation.
By the second day –
at UCL itself – the tone and the content were more radical and more avowedly political. Instead
of focusing on getting citizens to support and participate in 'proper
science', there was more emphasis on science that served community
activists. There were projects on community noise mapping through
smartphones and web apps, projects on community air qualitymonitoring through self-built connected sensors, and a DIY "satellite" imaging kit based on helium balloons and open source software from
the US-based Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS).
The inspiration of open
source, in terms of both hardware and software, was everywhere. One
of the sponsors was the small Italian open source electronics company
Arduino, and one of the most compelling speakers was Tom Igoe, a
co-founder of the company as well as a lecturer in the completely
wonderful Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York
University. On the third day he led a workshop where those taking
part (including yours truly, who hasn't made anything more
complicated than a curry for years, and who last wrote a line of code
in 1977) built their own sensors from scratch and then programmed
them using C.
All around were people
sharing things, making stuff together, swapping ideas. There were DIY
sensors to monitor the levels in sewage outfalls – the fabulous
Dontflushme project, which also included an internet-connected
lightbulb.
A few times in my life
I've had the sensation of a curtain being pulled back to reveal
another world – where all sorts of great things have been going on,
out of site, for a long time. I had the same feeling at the beginning
of the 1990s, when I discovered the magazine Mondo 2000 and the first
few editions of Wired. During the day I was writing reports about
“value added network services” for telecoms companies, and in the
evenings I read about what weird groups of scientists and 'hackers'
were using the internet for. There was, of course, no connection
between the two activities. The telecoms companies were not
interested in the publication and knowledge-sharing tools of a bunch
of particle physicists; they had serious networks to build and
commercialize, running important services like EDI, X.400 email and
store and forward fax networks.
I had the same feeling
at this event. No-one here was likely to become rich from their
inventions, and most of them had no interest in doing so. The stuff
they are building isn't “enterprise-grade”, it isn't secure, and
there isn't a viable business model. Pretty much the same sort of
things that any expert would have said about the web in 1992. The
tools that these people are making and using, though, will turn out
to be important, and they will be part of the story of what the
internet does next.
There is so much more to write about, but I feel I want to post something now, if only so that I can begin to sleep at nights again rather than wondering how I am going to put this experience in to words. It's made me question so much, including what I am doing with myself, and why the practices of the industry analyst companies are all - without exception -- so wedded to outdated industrial-era production techniques and management styles. I can't help thinking that all sorts of businesses, but especially ours that is so much about knowledge production, can learn a lot from the motivations and behaviours of citizen scientists.
