Admirer of Truth

I maintain an idea journal that has far more concepts for innovations than I will ever have the time to implement. Rather than letting them gather dust, I’m starting a new series on my blog called “iWant”, which is similar in spirit to Y-Combinator’s RFS. Each installment of “iWant” will describe an idea that I hope someone will pick up and bring into the world.

Please “steal” these ideas. They are provided free of charge, though acknowledgment is always appreciated. As any entrepreneur knows, ideas are a dime a dozen. Hats off to anyone who puts in the sweat and tears necessary to execute any of these concepts!

So without further adieu, here is the first installment of “iWant!”:

Citizen Science

I am downright bullish on the future of “Citizen Science“. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, Citizen Science is a term for describing when ordinary people get together to collaboratively solve scientific challenges. Oftentimes, the people are in geographically disbursed areas and use the internet to coordinate their actions.

The reason I think this is such a promising method of inquiry is that it solves two big problems in one fell swoop:

* Citizen Science breathes new life into the way we learn and teach science.  Too much of science education is based upon learning dry facts as if they were gospel. The true beauty of science lies in observation and experimentation. Collaborative science projects can get kids (and their parents) excited about science again.

* Citizen Science enables an entirely new class of scientific discoveries. Many scientific investigations require a greater volume of data than any one person can collect, or require observations from more locations than any one person can visit. By using a distributed network of people to help out with these experiments, Citizen Science can prevail.

The Vision

I believe that Citizen Science could become a major force in both discovery and education if an online community existed that coordinated this kind of collaborative research. It would be an online platform where each week people could login to see a project on which they could help (kind of like a “Woot for Science”). The website would lead them through the process of how to complete their part of the task. Finally, the platform would facilitate the collection of data from everybody, and assemble it into a single coherent data set that the community could analyze and discuss.

Who knows what discoveries would emerge! Project possibilities are abundant. If there were a critical mass of people who participated, just think of the kinds of science that would suddenly be feasible:

* Entomology. My friend John Forkan imagines the community could create a crowdsourced directory of bugs across the world. Each participant would catalogue a handful of bugs. This would lead not only to an interesting directory, but also interesting maps of where bugs live. Plus, people could compare the kinds of bugs in their location with those of people in other locations, thereby learning about taxonomy and evolution.

* Genetics. With the price of genome sequencing falling exponentially, it may not be long before amateurs can get together and sequence the genomes of almost any creature. Just like the Human Genome Project, each participant would get a small snippet of the DNA. Using a home electrophoresis kit, perhaps they could sequence their small region of the genome. Put them together, and you have the entire genome.

* Astronomy. Amateurs have forever been hunting for comets. But what could you do if you could get thousands of amateurs together for one night? You could choose a small region of the sky, break it up into tiny sectors, and farm out observation of each sector to a participant. When people have spotted a possible comet candidate, they could interact with others in real-time to try to confirm their sightings. How fun would that be to do on Twitter?

I’m sure almost every scientist out there could take an important problem in their field and think of ways to break it down into small pieces that ordinary citizens can help solve.

The Product

To be an effective coordinator of Citizen Science, the online platform would need to facilitate several activities:

* Selection. Each week, the community needs to select a new project on which to collaborate. This could be done by voting, or through an editorial process. To keep focus, at any one time, there should only be one active project on which the community is working.

* Instruction. The service needs to assemble simple instructional materials (ideally a video) to teach people the main concepts they need to know when carrying out their part of the science project. Perhaps even this video could be user-submitted.

* Assignment. The platform needs to make it simple to carve up the project into small chunks and assign them to the right participants. The system should support decomposing projects in several standard ways, such as geographically or temporally.

* Collection. Whether people are uploading videos, contributing pictures, or filling out forms, it needs to be really easy for people to put their data into the system. To start, perhaps the platform could leverage other existing services, such as Google Docs.

* Analysis. This step is the most interesting and requires the most thought. The system needs to help people analyze the contributed data and discuss the implications. Visualization software, statistical tools, and well-moderated forums might well be worth integrating.

The Revenue

Charging for participation in this community would be a non-starter. We’d need as many people as possible to get involved. Therefore, a more promising revenue model is to sell various equipment or kits that participants might need to complete their tasks.

I imagine that most of the projects will require some kind of apparatus. Bird-watching tasks might require binoculars; meteorology tasks might require barometers; microbiology tasks might require petri dishes. Selling these items (either directly or through a Groupon-like referral model) could bring in enough revenue to support the platform.

The Team

I have dispensed with describing the “market” or other details of the economics of this idea because it’s not at all clear that it would be a big opportunity financially. So rather than a scrappy little startup taking this on in order to build a big business, here are a couple of alternative organizations that might instead be well-suited to execute this idea:

* Lab Equipment or Hobby Kit Companies. These organizations could use the platform to promote the sales of their equipment. Since many of them already have relationships with science teachers at schools, they could recruit entire classrooms to be the early participants of the platform. It would be a brilliant complementary service for their existing products. Edmund Scientific and Thames & Kosmos, are you listening?

* Science Museums or University Outreach Offices. These organizations have it in their mission to teach the public about science. As such, they would be perfect to take on the construction of this platform. Through their membership, they already have relationships with science-interested amateurs, who could be the initial participants. I’d love to see the Boston Museum of Science, the American Museum of Natural History, the Exploratorium, or the Maryland Science Center launch this idea!

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you are excited enough to take this idea and run with it. Even if you are a single person and you’re not sure how you could help, just register your interest in the comments. Maybe if enough people chime in, you could form a team to make this idea a reality. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. In the words of Up, “Adventure is Out There!”