What is Citizen Science?

Citizen science is the name given to enlisting members of the general public to participate in scientific data gathering and analysis. One of the founding institutions of the concept was the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which has collected an enormous amount of data from observations of space across many years and in a variety of formats. The problems that SETI faces is that it does not have the computer capacity to analyse all of the data gathered – it is necessary to examine the observations to find something so out of the ordinary that it might indicate the presence of extra-terrestrial activity. This does not require any great intelligence or even attention to what is happening – what it needs is a lot of computers working over the data.

To help solve the problem, the SETI people encourage members of the public to participate by downloading a small program (from BOINC) and then setting this program as the screensaver. While the computer is idle and the screensaver working, therefore, it can be working on data analysis. The program communicates automatically via the internet when it has results to report or needs more data to analyse.

Since the original project, dozens of other scientific projects have also made data available to the public via BOINC. It is now possible for your own computer to participate in the search for a cure for cancer, to analyse data concerning the global climate and to help eradicate malaria, among many others. This represents a sensible use of existing resources.

Citizen science also refers to scientific projects in which the public can participate by providing observations directly. For example, an annual project in Britain asks people to make a note of which species of birds visit their gardens on one specific day. This helps to build a very useful census of bird information which it would not be feasible for scientists to create using their own resources only. Many people are interested in projects of this sort and willing and happy to participate: there are thousands and perhaps millions of people who spend their nights with telescopes observing the night sky and their observations have the benefit that they have been witnessed by a human being who has been able to tell whether there is something interesting to report.

Citizen science of this sort can be very useful in developing public interest in science, which is always a good thing and a means of challenging the obfuscations of superstition and its cronies. There is, nevertheless, a danger during this crisis of austerity that some states will try to justify budget cuts to scientific agencies on the basis that citizen scientists can replace the experts.