This is the powerpoint presentation I gave at the WASSIC 2011 conference. It's aimed at giving an overview of crowdsourcing, citizen science and social media - and the risks and opportunities that it brings for spatial practitioners.

1. GAIA RESOURCES Crowdsourcing What are the risks and opportunities for spatial practitioners? Piers Higgs Gaia Resources Presented at WASSIC 2011, 21st June, 2011

3. Citizen science

4. Social media

5. What are the risks?

7. CROWDSOURCING What is Crowdsourcing? Oxford English Dictionary: “the practice whereby an organisation enlists a number of freelancers, paid or unpaid, to work on a specific task or problem” Wikipedia: “The act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call”

9. Volunteer readers were assigned books, and then created quotation slips from them

11. 7,000+ people, 420,000+ surveys and over 7.1 million bird records

13. CROWDSOURCING What models of Crowdsourcing are used? Crowdsourcing Crowdfunding Crowdvoting Crowdcreation Crowd wisdom

14. CROWDSOURCING Spatial Crowdsourcing?

15. CROWDSOURCING Spatial Crowdsourcing?

16. CROWDSOURCING Spatial Crowdsourcing?

17. CROWDSOURCING Spatial Crowdsourcing?

18. CROWDSOURCING What is Crowdsourcing doing? Crowdsourcing Design tasks Tune Algorithm Provide Data Citizen Science

19. CROWDSOURCING What is Citizen Science?

20. CROWDSOURCING What is Citizen Science? Oxford English Dictionary: No exact results found for “citizen science” in the dictionary. Wikipedia: “a term used for projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation.”

22. Mission:

23. “To develop an authoritative, freely accessible distributed and federated biodiversity data management system”

24. Working in a range of areas to deliver this, all around the ALA web sitewww.ala.org.au

25. CROWDSOURCING What’s our experience?

28. CROWDSOURCING What is Social Media? Oxford English Dictionary: Cannot search without a login and paid account now… Wikipedia: “Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.”

30. CROWDSOURCING Risks and Opportunities

35. In the US: 1,500 million hours a month online doing one of these two things25% of total internet use

37. Use an experience system

38. Multiple long & short term aims

39. Reward effort

40. Rapid feedback

41. Uncertainty

42. Windows of enhanced attention

43. Other peoplehttp://tinyurl.com/28mvx7v

51. Who owns a recordthat is entered to acitizen science project?

52. Can you even “own”a piece of data?Risk Risk Risk Risk Risk Risk Risk

54. In other states of Australia, Freedomof Information is being replaced byRight to Information

55. Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Frameworkwww.ausgoal.gov.auOpportunity

57. A way to alienate people?

58. A source of rubbish data?

59. A way to lose money?

60. A way to lose quite a bit of money?Yes!

62. A way to engage with people?

63. A source of free data?

64. A way to save money?

65. A way to get money?Yes!