Citizen Science and Open Source Labs

Abstract

The technologies we have talked about in this book so far can be used for many things. One of the most exciting possibilities of the combination of low-cost custom fabrication and ubiquitous electronics may be the rise of citizen. This chapter uses the term broadly, to mean participation by nonscientists in the solution of difficult scientific problems. The public may be recruited to analyze data by donating time on their computers when the computers are idle, or they may help analyze big pools of data that for some reason are difficult to work with in a fully automated way. They may go out and get data in the field to allow an investigator to have far more reach than he may have been able to get by walking around on his own. In this chapter, we primarily talk about science that includes participation by a professional scientist in some way.