All these things not entirely made by me

All of this not entirely made by me

Jaggeree/think/help/create/work

All these thingsnot entirely made by me

me

Thank you so much for inviting me, I thought I’d never really attend a science conference again despite being trained as a computational immunologist. I work with Crowdsourcing, is essentially what this conference is about. I’m interested in data, but I’m also interested in people and why and how they get involved in communities and give their time to make things together.

I wanted to talk about some of the underlying mechanisms we use in building crowdsourced apps in the hope that there is some crossover.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).



This is a definition from Wikipedia which itself is community annotated or crowdsourced

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#cite_note-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#cite_note-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_participatory_design

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_participatory_design

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science

http://www.threadless.com/



Threadless, crowdsourced clothing company, people submit designs, others say they’ll buy them, when enough people commit they make them and you can buy too

http://maps.google.com



And for me one of best examples is not this, but it’s much better replacement. This is this area as seen by Google Maps

http://www.bgbm.org/bgbm/



I found this better map on a leaflet in my hotel room last night

http://www.openstreetmap.org/



And this is what Open Streetmap, a crowd sourced community can do. Open Streetmap grew out of a university final year project. Steve Coast was at UCL and the Ordinance Survery wanted £100,000 for a license for a map, so he created an alternative

http://maps.google.com



People can map better than organisations, they can go on foot places vehicles can’t and they’re not restricted by rights

http://www.openstreetmap.org/



Which means that the quality is amazing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nick_bl/



They have mapping parties and even have high score tables for who maps the most. Every GPS point is attributed to a user

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/



These are the actual GPS trails for New York

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/



This is the last year... as you can see Germany has been fairly busy



crowdsourcing where political boundaries are as the ordinance survey restricts access

Game mechanicsOpenness Linked dataActivity surfacingIdentity/social graph



For me there are some key mechanisms at work and I try to build as many of them in as possible, I’ll go through them one by one

Game mechanicsLinked dataOpenness Activity surfacingIdentity/social graph



Game mechanics, learning from play and the games industry



A couple of fascinating things happened last year

Obama got elected on crowdsourced funding and by saying “we” rather than I, oh and the previous chap wasn’t too popular

Obama for America iPhone app

See nationwide 08 Call Friends total and find our how your call totals compare to leading callers

Oh my god, it’s a high score table... it’s a game of electioneering

“Obama for America just launched an Massively Multiplayer Online Game, and nobody noticed.”>Tom Armitage, infovore

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdcawley/



Tom Armitage said it best, there is a leader board function from multiplayer games built right into the Obama campaign

Health Sciences Literature Review Made Easy by Judith Garrard



We’ve had games in science for a while... the points mean prizes mechanism of grant funding based on citation analysis and journals

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teamstats



and folding at home, crowdsourced application through and through




Secondly is openness



Twitter was open in that it just allowed you 140 characters... any 140 characters



which allowed The Guardian to make this...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carthorse/



This is another great example of openness, Amanda Rose on the right created this idea of a festival for people who use twitter... she then made it open and asked anyone in the world to create a festival and raise money for a charity called charitywater

http://vimeo.com/charitywater



it raised $250,000 and they’re now sinking clean drinking water wells in Africa

I don’t really need to tell you about openness... it happens with everything from genomes, sequences, cell lines, mouse strains




OpenPlatform


Jaggeree/think/help/create/workAll of this not entirely made by me


Project I’m proud to be a part of, opening out all The Guardian content we can, data from infographics, and articles all on a search API like PubMed

Weaving The Guardian into the fabric of the internet.>Matt McAlister

Building a content mashup with The Guardian, Delicious, Freebase and App Engine

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigsaw/



opening gambit for what we were trying to achieve, what it actually means is The Guardian is crowdsourcing some new business models in the newspaper industry


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We also wanted to show off about linked data possibilities, here’s a fun sort of application


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Guardian


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Delicious


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This was my demo for Open Platform launch, something I’m really proud of... Built in 8 hours

You can find bits of Guardian content you want to help annotate... it shows you the Guardian tags and also shows you what people have tagged that content on Delicious.

You can also do controlled vocabulary tagging with the tag this article box, searching Freebase for tags and then saying if the article is about that tag or just mentions it.

Weaving The Guardian into the fabric of the internet.


Guardian

Delicious

Bespoke?

Freebase

Content APIContent API Python Library

Delicious APIDelicious Python Library

AppEngineJQuerySome Python/HTML/Javascript

Freebase APIFreebase Suggests

by stitching together blocks of lego, I just wrote about 200 lines of code in total

I’m not really a programmer, I make things out of the possibility lego of libraries and apis



yet built something quite rich

science has linked data, pubmed ids, gene names, mouse strains, cell lines, also has synonym tables




Last two go together in a way

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wishymom/

we are a herd animal



We are a herd animal. We are essentially the social ape. We cannot escape our biology and in some ways that’s useful as if it didn’t there would be no social networks.

We respond to influence, we migrate from place to place within digital networks following others.

social proof/influence

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sovietuk/



it’s always more tempting to eat at a restaurant with a queue, rather than an empty one

social networks surface activity constantly in newsfeeds and activity streams, we can harness that for science



this is my twitter stream, my thoughts and what I’m doing, people see what I say do and think and some follow me... like bizarrely a cornish restaurant



last.fm/lastgraph

and this is the output of a service called last.fm which watches what you play on iTunes, it has an API and Andrew Godwin made this lovely thing which visualizes how your listening changes

Someone you know is helping to map routes around cities based on their personal view of accessibility.

Tell us your story on AccessCity

http://www.acesscity.co.uk/



AccessCity, project I’m proud to have been involved in. Started at Social Innovation Camp with a team of just 6.

Aim is to build a crowdsourced map of London from an accessibility standpoint which relates to real time user-centric information.




Geography is all about your personal involvement with a location and this can only be gathered by people not machines and by users not surveyors.

It’s also totally time based as anyone who tries to use Kings Cross station on a Friday night can attest

we’re letting people use accounts they already have and surfacing their activity back to Facebook




And we’re giving people profiles and soon you’ll be able to follow people so you can see what travel issues they have




Identity is key



This is my identity on a travel network called dopplr, you tell it where you go



and it tells you about coincidences where friends are in the same place as you at the same time



It’s also becoming a social atlas of places from a human centric point of view, people say where they’ve eaten, stayed and answer questions... and linked data to Flickr and Zagat improve the depth of data

So what can we crowdsource?



What could work for science

So what can we crowdsource?Identity/activity



I think a key thing is identity and activity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdcawley/

You can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it.>Simon Willison



Simon’s quote



ScienceIDgiving science a sense of identity

http://scienceid-demo.appspot.com

so I thought I’d play

why a science ID

Can disambiguate literature

Can reward people for actions, not just publications... hopefully in the future people could be funded through all they do





PubMed + OpenID + OAuth + APIs + AppEngine (Python)

ScienceIDgiving science a sense of identity



Biopython Tutorial and Cookbook

Je! Chang, Brad Chapman, Iddo Friedberg, Thomas Hamelryck,Michiel de Hoon, Peter Cock, Tiago Antao

Last Update – 3 April 2009 (Biopython 1.50 beta)

Some lovely person made this



this is where I’m at after about 8 hours... not there yet, but about quarter the way there... the idea is that people can claim science they did, over time that will make a rich profile and they eventually if you can drive adoption they can use that profile to log into other sites enriching those sites with the data held against the ID and enriching their profile through their actions (last.fm for science). This could include submitting data and papers.



this is my twitter graph visualised by my data and that of my friends, it’s scarily accurate, I’ve told it nothing about my social graph explicitly, just think how useful this could be for science



so here’s the flow so far



login with an existing id



create a very minimal profile



Simon’s quote



get started with it... note social sites have very friendly copy, it’s a conversation



search for your stuff



search for your stuff



Simon’s quote



Simon’s quote

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/



Chris [email protected]

Thank you

would love to thank all of my collaborators, however you’d probably not know any of them apart from the lovely BioPython people, but thank you for the invite and for listening

Travel

All these things not entirely made by me