Crowdsourcing Science ~ Cook on Discovery++

Gareth Cook in Globe Ideas writes How crowdsourcing is changing science...

"Science is driven forward by discovery, and we appear to stand at the beginning of a democratization of discovery. An ordinary person can be the one who realizes that a long arm of a protein probably tucks itself just so; a woman who never went to college can provide the crucial transcription that reveals a spidery script to be a love poem from 2,000 years in the past. Nobody can say where the movement will go, but among the new pioneers of crowd science, there is a palpable sense that they have just happened upon a powerful, poorly understood new resource."

Lots of interesting examples mentioned, including iSpot, NOAH, SETI@home, Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse, and others!