Crowdcrafting.org is an open source software platform launched this year for developing and sharing projects that rely on the help of thousands of online volunteers. “It enables the rapid development of online citizen science applications, by both amateur and professional scientists.”
There are already many citizen science projects that harness virtual volunteering, in fields as diverse as proteomics and astronomy. These projects often involve hundreds of thousands of dedicated online volunteers over many years. The objective of Crowdcrafting is to make it quick and easy for professional scientists as well as amateurs to design and launch their own online citizen science projects. This enables even relatively small projects to get started, which may require the effort of just a hundred volunteers for only a few weeks.
An example occurred after the tropical storm that wreaked havoc in the Philippines. A volunteer initiative called Digital Humanitarian Network (which has been mentioned many times here on the TechSoup forum) used Crowdcrafting to launch a project called Philippines Typhoon. This enabled online volunteers to classify thousands of tweets about the impact of the storm, in order to more rapidly filter information that could be vital to first responders.
Applications already running on Crowdcrafting range from classifying images of magnetic molecules to analyzing tweets about natural disasters. During the testing phase, some 50 new applications have been created, with over 50 more under development. The Crowdcrafting platform is hosted by University of Geneva, and is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a Geneva-based partnership co-founded by University of Geneva. The Sloan Foundation has recently awarded a grant to this joint initiative for the further development of the Crowdcrafting platform.
Here’s an example, where volunteers are sought to transcribe a PDF.
Commenting on the underlying technology, Rufus Pollock, founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, said, “Crowdcrafting is powered by the open-source PyBossa software, developed by ourselves in collaboration with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. Its aim is to make it quick and easy to do crowdsourcing for good—getting volunteers to help out with tasks such as image classification, transcription and geocoding in relation to scientific and humanitarian projects.”
The project is talked about on a blog posted both here and here, by Francois Grey, a Shuttleworth Fellow, focusing on the advancement of Open Science, specifically Citizen Cyberscience. He is coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre.
Also see: