Not only is mass collaboration being used on the internet for business, but it is also being on the internet in several other fields, including science, specifically meteorology. With today’s weather, it is hard to make accuracte predictions of the climate over a long period of time. That’s why some websites like Galaxy Zoo implement mass collaboration by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in their research. These ordinary citizen scientists will help classify and analyze meteorological data to help create better models of the Earth’s climate. Many are surprised by the amount of insight and knowledge the general public has on these scientific concerns.
Galaxy Zoo has been a huge success. It has involved over 250,000 citizen scientists. On this website, citizen scientists use the simple classification tools on the site to classify different galaxies. Over 75 million classifications have been made for 1 million galaxies. This has gone beyond the expectations of Galaxy Zoo as they had only expected about 50,000 different classifications from the general public. On Galaxy Zoo, anyone can participate in the betterment of the Earth’s climate by simply answering a series of questions when given a picture of a galaxy. A sample question may be something like this: “How round is it” or “Does the galaxy have a bulge at its centre?” Galaxy Zoo provides many explanations and pictures for unfamiliar vocabulary for the common folk.
Overall, this project can continue to be successful if other nations were willing to participate in it. Since this sort of data is usually sold, a barrier they will have to overcome is being willing to unite with other countries for the betterment of research on the Earth’s climate. Imagine the benefits this could have on Earth. Many lives could be saved from natural disasters through better prediction of the weather.
It is quite clear that mass collaboration is significant in bettering our world as it can help find results through research that were not possible to find before. If you want to read more blogs about this topic, they can be found on Antony D. Williams blogging site on Environment and Sustainability at http://anthonydwilliams.com/2010/09/06/mass-collaboration-to-improve-climate-data-a-new-frontier-in-citizen-science/.
The website for Galaxy Zoo is: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/
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