Enabling infinitesimal resolution at a global scale is no easy feat and so we must choose a place to start. Where better than to begin where all stewardship must start - with the curation of knowledge. If it is your hope to nurture something you must first get to know it!
Building knowledge is in many ways no different than building anything else. You start by collecting the raw, unstructured materials from which you will build your structure - in our case data. The collection phase. Then, as you would plane timber into boards or mix raw materials into concrete, the next step is turning your raw unstructured data into normalized, sanitized, and meaningful pools of information. The enrichment phase. And finally, as we stitch together our building materials to create a home, we begin to weave together our information into an actual narrative. The reporting phase. With these stages in mind it should be clear that we can narrow our starting scope even further and focus on the point where all knowledge creation must begin - the collection of raw data.
As of today there are, roughly speaking, three ways to collect data - professional measurement, remote sensing, and crowdsourcing. It is to the last of these three that we will direct our attention.
Consider for a moment that the global population has exceeded 7 billion. This is an enormous number that is very difficult for our hunter gatherer brains to grasp so let’s think about this in a slightly different way. Imagine that you’re in a large city square with ~1,000 people (besides yourself) milling about and you’re looking for someone with an interest in the biology of mushrooms. Now suppose only a single person in that whole crowd fits the bill. Pretty disappointing right? Not really. Even if only 1 out of every 10,000 people on the planet had an interest in the biology of mushrooms that would make for a force of over 700 thousand people. To put this in perspective the entire population of the city of ancient Rome was somewhere around 500 thousand. This is the power of crowdsourcing. With today’s population, even if only minuscule fractions of people take interest they can still end up representing workforces that whole societies would’ve had trouble pulling together in the past.
This crowdsourcing power is already being wielded for earth stewardship through applications like eBird, iNaturalist, and Nature’s Notebook. Apps like these give people across the globe an opportunity to help collect data about their local environment that has been used to create real, scientific knowledge and management programs. Yet, while these apps are phenomenal they have only begun to scratch the surface of the full scope of data we could obtain from crowdsourcing (in this case known better as citizen science) to help drive our understanding of our biosphere. So, in order to drive this forward the question we must ask ourselves is simply this - what barriers are there to entry into this space? The answer is unfortunately rather daunting.
To see why this is, let us put ourselves in the shoes of someone wanting to start curating a new kind of crowdsourced data. First they must determine what kind of protocol they wish to give users to use to collect the data. This part of the problem is no issue as this is well within a steward’s wheelhouse. The problems arise when considering how to get this protocol to users in a scalable way. Distributing a protocol across a country or across the globe means an application will need to be built and as with all applications there will need to be a UI, a database, APIs, proper security, authentication, styling, … you get the idea. For someone not versed in application development this is daunting indeed. And, when you consider the fact that this application will likely need to be supported across several different platforms, the headaches and worries just multiply. But it doesn’t end here. Even if the app gets built there’s still the issue of drawing users to it. Now our poor steward has to consider adoption strategies and driving and maintaining engagement. Successful applications take teams of developers to create and support - and for a reason.
So what can we do about this? Well, when you look across the crowdsourced data apps that already exist in this space, one quickly realizes that the only differences between them are the protocols used to collect the data and the portals used to subsequently view and engage with the data collected. Otherwise everything else, including much of the user base, is simply duplicated over and over again.
So suppose instead that there was a platform built that implemented all of these redundancies just once, hosted these varying protocols and portals, and took on the mission of driving discovery and engagement much like Spotify or youtube drives discovery and engagement of its content? Then suddenly our stewards don’t have to worry about building an app or building a user base from scratch but simply need to develop protocols and portals - the bit that, once again, is well within their wheelhouse. This would all but remove the barriers to entry into this space and provide the catalyst for crowdsourcing all sorts of data that could drive forward our understanding of the biosphere. Even for the user this is a better deal as they can create their own personalized citizen science hub instead of having to spread themselves across a whole variety of different applications.
The mission then is clear. To catalyze our ability to crowdsource data from around the globe we need a platform whose mission entails two factors:
Consolidating everything that’s currently redundant
Driving discovery and engagement amongst the various protocols and portals
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