Crowdscience

Description

By Ludovico Ristori:

"The term Crowdscience (that is, the science of people) has recently become a very popular term. It means that people (a nineteenth-century term that perhaps should be replaced with the term “citizens”), by actively taking part in research, can enable discoveries, that would otherwise not be possible with traditional media – for the mental, computational and economic resources they require. It also assumes that first-person participation in scientific projects is one of the few ways to not be relegated on the sidelines of democracy in a society permeated at all levels by scientific and technological knowledge.

As for the origin of crowdscience, some individuals focused on astronomy – with the SETI@Home experience back in the 1990s and the collaboration of nearly 3 million people to the study of space signals – others on other most disparate topics. A sure thing is that nowadays there exist a wide variety of crowdscience portals focusing on a wide range of fields.

Neurosciences and especially neuroinformatics have their very own crowd versions. Among these, there is a case that is currently quite successful on the internet: the company Backyard Brains, founded by two students of the University of Michigan, Gregory Gage and Tim Marzullo." (http://www.digicult.it/news/backyard-brains-neuroscience-for-fun/)