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Symposium on Crowdsourcing and Scientific Data
Quality
There's a very interesting free symposium being presented by the
National Research Council's Board on Research Data and Information on
June 13, 2011 in Washington DC dealing with crowdsourcing, social
networking, and scientific data quality. The issues being considered
connect directly to recent discussions at CNI and at the International
Data Curation Conference, among other venues, on the relationships
among cyberinfrastructure and data intensive scholarship on one side
and the new resurgence of citizen science (and citizen humanities) on
the other.
I've reproduced the announcement for the meeting below. I
hope that some CNI-announce readers will be able to attend.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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Dear colleague:
You are cordially invited to attend a public symposium on
Crowdsourcing: Improving the Quality of Scientific Data Through Social
Networking. The event is being organized by the National Research
Council's Board on Research Data and Information, and will be held on
June 13 in Washington, DC at the Embassy Suites, 900 10th Street, NW.
A formal invitation with the summary description of the symposium, the
exact location, and RSVP instructions may be found below.
Please feel free to forward this invitation to others who you think
may be interested. Registrations will be honored on a
first-come-first-served basis. More complete information about the
event and about the Board on Research Data and Information is
available at: http://www.nationalacademies.org/brdi.
Our apologies if this is a duplicate.
Best wishes,
Paul F. Uhlir
Director, Board on Research Data and Information
puhlir@nas.edu
Crowdsourcing: Improving the Quality of
Scientific Data Through Social Networking
A PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM
Organized by the
Board on Research Data and Information
National Research Council
(http://www.nationalacademies.org/brdi)
Monday, June 13, 2011, 4:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m.
Embassy Suites, 900 10th Street, NW, Washington, DC
Crowdsourcing may be described as a distributed information
production and problem-solving activity, today performed mostly
online. The technique invites contributions on one or more specific
issues or problems, either from a targeted group or the general
public. Although there are many types of crowdsourcing applications in
many sectors and businesses, the public research community has used
the techniques extensively in recent years.
According to Wikipedia, itself a highly successful crowdsourcing
initiative, there are many perceived benefits to this model (see www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsoucing; last visited May
27, 2011):
- Various topics can be addressed at a low cost and usually quite
rapidly, frequently with no payments to the contributors;
- The organization doing the crowdsourcing can greatly broaden the
potential contributions beyond its own employees and direct contacts;
- The crowdsourcing activity may be able to provide the views of
many prospective customers or other interested parties, and can
initiate and develop relationships that would be difficult or
impossible to initiate otherwise.
Different internet services can be used for online crowdsoucing,
from traditional websites and emails, to social networking sites, such
as Facebook. Because of the growing use and potential importance of
this technique to various research applications, including the
improvement of scientific information resources, the Board on Research
Data and Information is holding a public symposium in the afternoon of
Monday, June 13, beginning at 4:00 p.m. The symposium will explore
some of the key issues underlying crowdsourcing, provide several
compelling examples, and offer an opportunity for the audience to
discuss this topic with a number of experts and practitioners. We are
pleased to offer the following program, moderated by Prof. Michael
Lesk of Rutgers University, and chair of the Board on Research Data
and Information:
Speakers
Roberta Balstad, Columbia University
The first crowdsourcing experiment: lessons
learned
Gregory Phelan, State University of New York at
Cortland
Use of crowdsourcing online in scientific
research
Scott Hausman, NOAA National Climatic Data
Center
Engaging the public in climate science:
exploiting crowdsourcing to
digitize and analyze climate data
[Presenter TBD]
The GEO wiki project
Benjamin Heywood, CEO PatientsLikeMe
(invited)
[Presentation title TBD]
Comment by Michael Keller, Stanford
University and BRDI Member
Panel discussion of invited speakers and Board
members
and
General discussion with the audience
The symposium is open to the public, but advance
registration is requested
(contact: Cheryl Levey, clevey@nas.edu or call
202-334-1531).
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