Crowdfunding Citizen Science: Is it Working?

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Funding for citizen science has been preoccupying me recently.  In most cases I think about creating business models that can develop and use funds that support the field.  But that's not the only option.  Scientists are well-versed in requesting grant funds for citizen science support, and over the last few years crowd-funding has also been used.  In fact the 2015 Citizen Science Conference is requesting crowd-funding assistance.  But is it working?

I've done a (very) preliminary analysis and made it publicly available on the web.  Feel free to add or modify if you'd like.  You'll see this not a rigorous analysis...just a basic search of four sites (Rockethub, Experiment, IndieGoGo, and Kickstarter) for the phrase "citizen science."  While this leaves out many potential projects it still reveal a lot for or purposes here.

I thought this would take a significant amount of effort..sadly that was not the case.  For starters,  I only found 18 projects spanning the last few years. Why is this?  Partly I think it's indicative of how citizen science (as a term or identifiable field) is still not completely mainstream. So projects that may be citizen science by our definitions would not use that phrase to describe or market themselves.

Even the total of all these projects came out to a mere $81,000.  Citizen science can be an extremely cost effective way to do research, but $81,000 is not nearly enough to cover its costs. Especially when those projects only raised $62,000 (76%) of that amount. Something is missing.

Looking even more closely at these individually, many are not specifically citizen science projects. Instead they use citizen science as one small part of the research, or it is an educational project that impacts citizen scientists as one of many audiences. Again, this is not enough to make a significant impact.

But maybe we are looking at this in the wrong way. This simple analysis only looked for projects that included the specific "Citizen Science" phrase. Would evaluating projects ourselves for a citizen science connection (without relying on text searches) teach us something?

Yes.  A lot.

Here are just a few of many examples:

• Experiment.com: Something is Wrong on the Internet! What do science bloggers do? - Understanding the motivations and topic areas of amateur and professional science communicators
• Kickstarter.com: OpenQPCR - Creating an affordable PCR maching for performing DNA diagnostics at home

The good side of this is how vividly it demonstrates the potential support available for citizen science projects. The public is interested in this research and the products it creates, and they are willing to fund it.  Literally millions have already been spent and much more can come in the future.

Unfortunately, the bad side is it further demonstrates the lack of "pull" the term citizen science has for inspiring the public. In my view potential funders either a) don't feel connected to the term, and 2) care more about individual projects and not the field as a whole. So there is still much hope for project leaders who make their research interesting to the public. But just relying on goodwill sadly won't cut it. There is already a wealth of information on successfully starting a crowd funded project ( such as here and here) so I won't reinvent the wheel. But these should apply to citizen science projects just as well as they do to any other type of project.

This leads me to re-starting the analysis while asking a whole new set of questions. How do we identify other citizen science projects for additional analysis?  Can we categorize these "non-traditional" or "emerging" types of projects into a useful model?  What might that model teach us about ways to make citizen science profitable for citizen scientists themselves?

The answer to all is I don't know. But next week I'll try to answer.

Stay tuned!

Diary of a Citizen Scientist

Last month Sharman Apt Russell published the new book "Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World."   After reading it through I was amazed at how well she captures the thrill, the curiosity, and the fun of citizen science.

From her home in New Mexico's Gila Valley she writes extensively about her time researching tiger beetles.  Not just catching them, but raising the larvae and making new contributions to science's understanding of them.  Through contacts with professional entomologists who guide her through the process, she is able to observe parts of the tiger beetle life cycle never seen before.  That's a joy as a researcher, and even more so as an "amateur researcher".

But she doesn't stop there.  She also writes about the field as a whole and the many citizen science projects that are growing by the day.  Some you've read about here before, others are quite new.  But all help us find new ways to engage and enjoy our world.

As a treat for you I'm proud to offer an excerpt from the book below.  I think it does a great job of capturing not only the essence of the overall book, but also the joy and wonder of citizen science.  Hopefully you'll enjoy it too, and if you do, I encourage you to pick up a copy through the OSU Press ordering site (here),  Amazon.com (here) or at your local bookstore. You'll be glad you did.

Renaissance and Revolution
It’s 2007 and you’re a young astrophysicist on your third pint in an English pub, clothes rumpled, head in your hands. You whine: in order to prove your latest theory on star formation, you need to compare large samples of galaxies with elliptical and spiral shapes. What you have to work with are a million unclassified galaxy images from a telescope in New Mexico. The shape of galaxies is a pattern computers cannot easily recognize, and you’ve spent a week, twelve hours a day, sorting through fifty thousand photographs. You close your weary eyes. You can’t keep up the pace. A friend murmurs, “Maybe you should get some help?”

Only a year ago, NASA’s Stardust@Home project started posting images online from its interstellar dust collector, and citizen scientists eagerly began looking for stardust particles. Could people be trained to classify galaxies, too? You brighten up. A British hurrah. You publicize your idea, you set up the website, and within twenty-four hours, you are getting almost seventy thousand classifications an hour. In the first year, you will get fifty million.That’s the apocryphal story behind Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science program that has since resulted in dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers, as well as discoveries like “green-pea” galaxies, which produce stars at a high rate and may help us understand how the first stars formed. Each galaxy classification by a single volunteer is corroborated by thirty more volunteers, with a resulting accuracy equal to that of professional astronomers. The universe—which may contain as many as five hundred billion galaxies—is slowly being mapped by cartographers of all ages, all occupations, and all nationalities.

Around the world, citizen science projects are proliferating like the neural net in a prenatal brain. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, is beginning to shape how research gets done. Some 860,000 people have participated in Galaxy Zoo and related projects on the website Zooniverse. More than a quarter million play the video game Foldit, helping biochemists synthesize new proteins. The National Geographic Society’s search for archaeological sites in Mongolia sends satellite images from the field to thousands of citizen scientists downloading them at home. The use of crowdsourcing to take advantage of large numbers of human eyes and brains has inspired the development of algorithms to improve how computers themselves work; like Yoda, we can teach them our mysterious ways.

Although the biggest citizen science programs are online, many other citizen scientists are getting up from the computer, going outside, and joining a research team to study urban squirrels or phytoplankton or monarch butterflies. Most obviously, they help scientists count things: juniper pollen, comets, horseshoe crabs, dragonfly swarms, microbes (in your belly button and in your kitchen), picas, thunderstorms, roadkill. An estimated two hundred thousand people work with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology tracking and monitoring birds, with over a million observations reported each month on the Lab’s online checklist. Citizen scientists also double as environmental activists, collecting air and water samples, documenting invasive species, and looking at changes in species behavior.

An army of human volunteers has become an army of scientific instruments, and that’s not a new idea. In China, people have been recording locust outbreaks for over three thousand years. French wine growers began tracking grape harvests in the fifteenth century. Charles Darwin relied on a network of amateurs for observations of the natural world, working-class men and middle-class women, vicars and shopkeepers with whom he corresponded by penny post. Today we’ve replaced the pen with the login, using the Internet to communicate in ways that make large-scale, long-term projects possible.

One of the newest and potentially most important branches of citizen science is the analysis and understanding of global warming, with programs like Nature’s Notebook and Project Budburst using volunteers to monitor plant and animal responses to a changing climate.  What plants are budding when? What birds are here now? What insects have emerged?

In Portland, Oregon, a couple and their two children walk the trails of urban parks watching for the first leaves of kinnikinnick, the flowers of Indian plum, the fruits of the mellifluous salmonberry, snowberry, thimbleberry. Before the start of spring, the trilliums are underground and the snowberry leafless. Suddenly the Oregon grape has clusters of yellow flowers that attract hummingbirds. Warmer and longer days bring more color and scent, camas lily and bleeding heart and lupine and salal and wild rose, and then in the fall, maples turn red and the leaves of Solomon’s seal yellow and gold. Carefully, the oldest daughter records this information online. Conscientiously, the family marks the appearance of spotted towhees and northern flying squirrels, the absence of Pacific tree frogs. Their efforts are being duplicated across rural and urban America by thousands of men, women, and children.

This is renaissance, your dentist now an authority on butterflies and you (in retrospect this happened so pleasantly, watching clouds one afternoon) connected by Twitter to the National Weather Service. This is revolution, breaking down the barriers between expert and amateur, with new collaborations across class and education. Pygmy hunters and gatherers use smartphones to document deforestation in the Congo Basin. High school students identify fossils in soils from ancient seas in upstate New York. Do-it-yourself biologists make centrifuges at home. This is falling in love with the world, and this is science, and at the risk of sounding too much the idealist, I have come to believe they are the same thing.

My own work with tiger beetles, under the guidance of two generous mentors, was done mainly during the field seasons of 2011–2012. The entries that make up this book describe that fieldwork and have been shaped from written notes and the observations of those two years. In the larger world of citizen science, not much has changed from then to the writing of this introduction now. Only the numbers have increased: more and more people are watching birds, taking water samples, staring into the heart of a red spiral galaxy, marrying curiosity with collective power, waking up and thinking--what am I going to study today?

Reprinted with Permission.

Open Source Computing and Citizen Science Innovation - Where They Start and End

The last few weeks I've been fleshing out thoughts on citizen science business models in preparation for next year's Citizen Science Conference in San Jose.  There is so much to sift through and people to talk with that I wanted to hit the ground running.  Of course there won't be nearly enough time to discuss everything during a two-day conference, but I hope this will start a discussion there, and on this blog, for a long time afterwards.

One interesting book I came across was "Making Open Innovation Work" by Stefan Lindegard, which offers great insights on companies harnessing the innovation of external researchers.  Many of these lessons can be applies to our discussion, but that's not why I'm writing.  Instead it forces me to ask a question that has bothered me a for a while but I've never successfully answered.

What is the dividing line between citizen science and open-source computing?  Is there one?

The reason I ask is the book discusses the work of TopCoder.com, a web site that connects open-source computer programmers with companies looking to pay for code.  Think of this as a for-profit version of the site Github.com.  In many ways what they do is scientific and many of the same citizen scientists in our field are the same as people drawn to open-source computing.  But the two fields have never really connected and we don't often hear them talked about in the same context.  Is this just a remnant of people not understanding the fields of data science/computer science, or is there something deeper? I have ideas on some of the differences but I want to hear yours.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.  I'll keep answering this question online before the conference and keep this conversation going.  But I think it's an interesting discussion regardless of a future presentation.

Citizen Science Business Models - An Idea Worth Exploring

Thank you all for your feedback.  With your advice I put together, and submitted, a proposal for the upcoming Citizen Science 2015 conference.  It's a favorite topic of mine and one that is essential to moving our field forward "For Love and Money: Business Models that support, benefit from, and share the rewards with, the work of citizen scientists."

This is an ambitious talk for me but one I feel is important.  In many ways I can only scratch the surface in a PowerPoint presentation to a conference room of citizen science professionals.  But it will kick off a whole series of follow-up reports on this blog about the topic.  There is much good background research that can't be included without overwhelming the audience, but is perfect for an online environment.  There are also nuances, subtleties, and sub-categories of information that are vitally important and can't fit on a Powerpoint slide.  But mostly I want to keep the conversation going long after the conference ends.

I'm doing this in my strong belief that the citizen science community can make important discoveries and support research that provide value to profit-making companies, and they deserve to be rewarded for that service.  But that money is also needed to support citizen science research and pay for investments that will expand what citizen scientists can do.  Research costs money and it has to come from somewhere.

Conferences also cost money.  And in true citizen science fashion they are hoping to crowdfund through the company Razoo for a significant amount of support. I'm hugely appreciative of all the opportunities this conference provides so I'm happy to make a donation.  Won't you join me?  This conference is here to help you but they need your support.  Give a little or give a lot, anything will help.

See you in Palo Alto!  

Care to Team Up on Some Citizen Science Conference Sessions?

I love a good conference.  Most are filled with opportunities to learn new things and meet like-minded people.  You can become an expert in anything by yourself at home, then suddenly realize there is much more to learn.  And it's a great way to stay motivated until the NEXT conference.  Which is why I'm so excited about next year's Citizen Science Association Conference in San Jose.

But what do I plan to talk about at the meeting?  And do you want to join me?

For starters, there is an open Call for Proposals for sessions due mid-September.  As I wrote last week there are some good ideas I've been considering that would be of interest to attendees and would take advantage of my previous work.  I've since narrowed it down to these two.  If you would like to help with them or have ideas of your own to add, please let me know.  I'd love to make these as inclusive as possible with the participation of a wide variety of people.   In other words, doing it the citizen science way.

• For Love and Money: Business models for creating a citizen science industry infrastructure that supports, and benefits from, the work of citizen scientists.

An important finding of my poster for the 2012 Citizen Science Conference was that "... the strongest positive correlation for all interactive citizen science projects is the availability of a reward."  This piqued many people's curiosity and was the source of many discussions at my poster.  While they all agreed with the sentiment none had a really good (and cost-effective) way of doing that, and they were looking for advice.  Unfortunately this is a "chicken and egg" problem where you need scale to drive benefits that bring monetary rewards, but getting to that scale required monetary incentives.  So we need to break this logjam and incrementally create a self-sustaining infrastructure that will support our efforts. 

This fits under the theme of "Tackling grand challenges and everyday problems with citizen science" by addressing the only way to ensure extensive data collection and public participation in scientific research - by introducing a profit motive.   This half hour session will include independent research on existing techniques,  analogies to other scientific fields, select experiences from current companies in the field, and impact analysis of existing projects that include profit motivators. 

The big challenge here is providing organization and self-sustaining momentum to the citizen science movement.  Currently we are reliant on people's good will and free time for their participation.  This applies across all of the various scientific fields that citizen science impacts, such as medicine, ecology, astronomy, and climate change. While this has worked for the time being we need to find ways to bring the POTENTIAL for amateur scientists to earn money from their work.  To do that, companies need to be able to profit from the work of amateur scientists. 

I see this session unfolding in the following way:

• Demonstrating need for a profit motive beyond altruistic, educational, and other motivating factors

• (Non-financial) Ways Profit Helps Citizen Scientists

• Ways to Benefit Companies

• Analysis of Current Profit Motivators (Quantitative)

• Analysis of Current Profit Motivators (Qualitative)

• Challenge Projects

• "Door Prizes" based on participation, not results

• Non-cash incentives 

• Bounties

• Entrepreneurship

• Crowd-funding

• Building the Infrastructure

• Initial Steps

• Middle Steps

• Final Vision

Through this session, we will see how developing an mutually beneficial infrastructure can help all participants and will lay out a course for achieving that vision. 

The big question is how large and long this talk will be.  There is a short version I can do as a solo speaker that should engage the audience and provide a lot of new perspectives to spark discussion.  And I'm already planning to include insights from some people already trying to make this work.  But I am still looking for some people/companies with experience partnering with and profiting from citizen science efforts.  If you are one of these people and would like to join the discussion, I'd love to make this a larger panel discussion for the full conference.

• Transparency in Government-Funded Research: Pros and Cons from a Citizen Science standpoint

This fits under the theme of "Digital Opportunities and Challenges in Citizen Science" by evaluating the impact of various "Open Science" efforts begun by Federal agencies on citizen scientists and citizen science projects (ironically, that is a different meaning than in my "OpenScientist" name).  This would be a short, 15-minute talk about the current policies of various Federal research agencies, description of the data and materials available to the public, analysis of how (and if) it is actually being used by citizen scientists in their research, and ideas for expanding both its use and utility. 

Unfortunately this is actually part of my day job and may require some ethics approvals to present.  But if there are people who want to talk about this issue (from either a citizen science or Federal agency standpoint) please let me know and it will be worth my going through clearances.

Unfortunately not all of my ideas fit into the six conference themes.  So "Citizen Science vs. Citizen Pseudo-Science: Separating amateur researchers from public crackpots" will need to be a future set of posts on this blog, as will "Federal Government's Role in Supporting Citizen Science: A history and future opportunities".

A third is a prime opportunity for a much longer set of posts or even a separate web site:"Re-Examining Citizen Science Throughout History: How pervasive were amateur researchers in the history of science versus "Establishment" or "Professional" researchers.  How can we apply those modern terms to yesterday's society?  Can we use historical lessons to increase public participation and respect in the field?"   It's not something I can show publicly in the next few months since time will be limited, but I encourage anyone interested in this topic to get in touch with me at OpenScientst (at) gmail.com.  I have a lot of ideas and would love to hear yours too.