For the last couple of years, I’ve helped to run workshops in Taipei with Academia Sinica and in Beijing with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on the topic of citizen cyberscience. These events, dubbed Asia@home workshops, were good in terms of disseminating the idea of citizen cyberscience to an audiences of scientists and IT professionals. But the communication was very one-way – speakers and listeners, teachers and students – and the concrete outcomes hard to pinpoint.

So this year, we did things differently, running the events as hackfests rather than workshops. What is a hackfest? Well, that is exactly what we found out last week in Taipei and Beijing, in a way that surprised even those who thought they knew the answer. What is clear to me, though, is that the concrete outcomes of this sort of event are far greater than the more classical show-and-tell workshops or even hands-on tutorials can generate. As a result, we’re already planning a similar event in Rio de Janeiro in May, which we’re calling Brasil@home.

I’ve blogged about the Taipei hackfest as part of a GridCast from the event, something that also got picked up by International Science Grid This Week, so I won’t what I said there. In fact, the mornings followed a fairly traditional worshop model, although with a good deal more focus than in previous Asia@Home events, the single topic being earthquake science. But the part that deviated from standard practice, and produced exciting results, was in the afternoon when we started to brainstorm about new projects, test out the software that might make those projects work, and even discuss – in plenum – fairly sensitive regional deployment issues in considerable detail.

A cross-cultural experience

The hackfest in Beijing on 24-25 March, run in collaboration with Mozilla Foundation and modelled in part on their succesful “Drumbeat events” was a complete break with the traditional workshop. It was a novel approach to getting mixing different cultures: scientists, web developers and online science enthusiasts, to work together to improve the accessibility and appeal of citizen cyberscience projects for a Chinese audience.

There were no lectures at the hackfest, as we had dispensed with that part of the process in a public evening event before the hackfest, where we ran through a bunch of 10 minute talks by both Chinese and international researchers who are using citizen cyberscience. There were simply a set of challenges, that had already been enumerated on the Mozilla website announcing the event. Prospective participants had been asked to pick their favourite challenges and tell the organizers what sort of skills they could bring to bear on them.

The challenges were ambitious: “Develop an attractive Chinese interface to existing citizen cyberscience projects, that can be accessed from popular Chinese chat portals…”; “Explore ways of adapting Chinese genomic research to volunteer computing…”; “Adapt volunteer computing projects to run on Longsoon, the MIPS-based Chinese processor…”. Indeed, the level of ambition might have scared away quite a few developers. But setting the bar high had a very positive consequence for the 30-odd scientists and hackers who split into three teams during the event: they got an amazing amount of work done.

Some of the work was highly technical: an open-ID sign-on was created for volunteer computing projects that use the BOINC platform, so that people with Google, Yahoo and Facebook accounts can dispense with much of the formalities of signing up to a citizen cyberscience project, and just click once to get going. Researchers from the EpiCollect project, which enables scientists to design questionnaires that can be downloaded to smart phones for collecting geolocated data from the field, worked with web developers on an HTML5 version of their software, so that it is now platform independent. A browser add-on was prototyped which allows users to click and get the latest statistics about their favourite citizen cyberscience projects.

Social Networking, Chinese style

Other outcomes were more concerned with how to promote citizen cyberscience in the rather unique Chinese internet environment, where there are dozens of Facebook and Twitter look-alikes vying for attention, while Facebook and Twitter are themselves blocked. For this, simple things matter, and clear communication is king. For example, one team spent a couple of hours working through a list of instructions for how to join the Tsinghua University volunteer computing project Computing for Clean Water, until the list was pared down to just the essential steps, and expressed in language so limpid that anyone ought to be able to follow – provided they read Chinese, of course!

The Mozilla co-organizers of the event were surprised by how much got done with relatively few developers. But after a while, the surprise turned into recognition of an old adage in the software industry: adding manpower to a software project slows it down (famously argued in Fred Brooks’ book The Mythical Man Month). For a citizen cyberscience hackfest, at least, the formula of one or two good developers per team seems to be ideal.

The scientists at the event were probably most surprised by the contributions of some of the citizen cyberscience enthusiasts who had come, in particular from a group called Equn.com which runs a Chinese language website explaining what volunteer computing is all about. These participants were brimming with good ideas for how to get more attention on the Chinese web. And they also had some very original ideas about how to reward volunteers who help online science projects. Instead of the usual stickers and t-shirts, one young participant advocated for a say in what the scientists were doing.

The proposal was modest enough: how about allowing the most productive volunteer to make one suggestion to the scientists? It could range from an improvement to the project interface, all the way to a new direction for the science that the project was trying to tackle. The only commitment the scientists would have to make is to address the suggestion seriously during the regular meetings where they plan their research, and communicate back whether and how they would implement it.

But like many modest proposals, this one could have quite profound consequences for the whole debate about open science, and to what extent public participation in science should imply public influence on the scientific agenda. As we sit mesmerized by expanding clouds and dribbling leaks of radioactivity in Fukushima, wondering just who those scientific experts were who promised us at most one catastrophic event like this every 10,000 years, expanding the role of citizens in science is no longer just a feel-good PR exercise. It is vital for the future of our global technological society.

All the more profound, then, that this modest proposal should come from a Chinese netizen and got a favourable hearing from the Chinese researchers who were present. Let’s hope they – and other scientists around the world – take the idea to heart.

Profound thoughts aside, though, the practical take-home message from the hackfest is that by mixing three communities, scientists, hackers and science enthusiasts, and shooting for the stars, it is just possible to reach the moon.

 

 

 

 

 

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