Citizen Science

With citizen science a kind of citizen science is referred to in the Anglo- Saxon world, in which not only academically trained scientists and experts do science, but science can also be operated by citizens.

Principle

As citizen participation is configured here is very different: In many projects, volunteers collect only data that are used for research purposes (for example, the occurrence of species in different regions). Then Citizen Science will take place as crowdsourcing process. In other cases, they represent members of advisory bodies that accompany research projects ( in the medical field ) or are involved in the design of research programs.

History

Until the specialization of scientific end of the 18th century and the advent of technical universities was the Citizen Science even the rule of Francis Bacon about Isaac Newton and Leibniz to Benjamin Franklin and even Charles Darwin.

In the course of miniaturization, digitization, and the rise of social networks and pervasive computing is such a science, practiced by citizens, always simple: the more mobile and less technical devices ( IR spectrometers, microscopes, scanners, readily available maps and aerial photographs, etc.), the more easily manageable for the citizens.

Advocates of a Citizen Science and " democratization of science" were Paul Feyerabend and Erwin Chargaff, the disgust felt by the money -based technocratic- bureaucratic science since 1950 and again for a " amateur science" pleaded, so a science, not exercised of universities and experts, but by bourgeois " amateurs " (in the real sense of the word ) " (nature) love".

Examples

The longest held since the project is Vogelzähl project of the National Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count, which began in 1900. Other known examples are the "World Water Monitoring Day " project, NASA 's Stardust @ home and click Workers, a variety of projects of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, such as eBird, Nest Watch, Project Feeder Watch, Celebrate Urban Birds. and the Galaxy Zoo project.

Examples from Germany are naturgucker.de or mosquito Atlas. Another is the project carried out since 2005 Butterfly monitoring Germany, with about 500 participants.

The co-operation of the laity not only to Datensammlerei, such as amateur astronomers, the asteroid or discover pulsars is limited. In the online game " Foldit " find (eg fibronectin ), which in turn can then be synthesized in expensive laboratories at the universities, for example, can lay themselves designing protein - folding structures and even stable forms (see Literature, Hand 2010).