Community Indicators: Citizen Scientists

I like the trend highlighted in this report from CNN's SciTech blog -- everyday people contributing to data collection. John Sutter calls it the "democratization of science" -- people capturing photos of wildlife, entering GPS locations of animals found, recording bird migrations -- all adding to a much broader scientific picture. It's the same message we've been trumpeting about data openness -- except it's headed the other way, with ordinary citizens providing information that scales upward.

This brings data sharing full circle, and I like it. See how you can be involved with this list of citizen scientist opportunities. I think we as community indicators practitioners ought to be paying attention to this trend, and with the right kind of framework/schema, we can be haviing more and more citizen-generated data aggregating upward to tell us much more about our communities, states, and the country we live in.

If you have experience in citizen-created data collection, please share!