Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects

CHAPTER 14

Making and Sharing Data as a Citizen Scientist

Introduction to Citizen Science

As we talked about in Chapter 13, scientists and makers who are sharing scientific tools enable everyone to be a scientist. This is helping a growing trend called citizen science. Citizen science (sometimes called crowdsourced science or civic science) is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists. You can become a citizen scientist simply by wanting to be one. Citizen science is just scientific research done by members of the general public, although it is often done in collaboration or under the direction of professional scientists and fancy scientific institutions. Citizen science can be really useful, and somewhat amazingly, ...