[Anna Barkalova (OP)]

Currently, in Russia crowdsourcing become more and more widespread as a tool for thorough analysis and decision-making. Some businesspersons and government officers use it for co-creation (citycelebrity.ru), city development and solving some scientific tasks (CREN, text tagging). Government authorities also make use of crowdsourcing for public discussions of FASO (Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations) programs and legislative initiatives of Ministry of Communications.
Crowdsourcing may help avoiding most of the problems, which nowadays affect decision-making process in research and technology area. The main problems include: small group decision making with lack of information and possible bias of analysis during the public discussion.
In this situation, the main value of crowdsourcing is the ability to utilize the experience and competencies of many remote experts, while preserving the quality of analysis and validity of the results. Xpir.ru, the expert platform for scientists and entrepreneurs, which is supported by Ministry of Science and Education, has developed the Crowdsourcing Expertize Service in order to encourage users to contribute to decision-making in science and research area. The community of Xpir users consists of scientists, entrepreneurs, experts of various areas of expertise, government and large business representatives.

The community of experts is being formed in two steps:
·       Step 1 – we form profiles for experts based on linguistic analysis of documents of the experts (papers, patents, research projects);
·       Step 2 – we group experts from similar areas of expertise into Expert Hubs
 
All the projects sent to the expert assessment undergo linguistic analysis and according to its results are automatically referred to one of the Expert Hubs.
 
Currently, in the Crowdsourcing Expertise Service we have 47 Expert Hubs, in which there are more than 1500 experts.
 
The service offers an opportunity to control the whole process of the crowdsourcing expertise, for example, it is possible to customize the visibility of the expertise, configure application forms and develop custom invitations.
 
Crowdsourcing expertise has many advantages in supporting the decision-making process in science and technology area in comparison with classical tools:
·       The evaluation is always unique and relevant as data for the crowdsourcing expertise is collected only after the beginning of the expertise
·       Experts from leading scientific foundations such as Federal Targeted Program “Research and Development 2014-2020” and Federal Targeted Program “Education Development” provide scientific correctness of the evaluation.
·       Experts in our service abide by rules and regulations and thus guarantee safety and confidentiality of the process.
Xpir Crowdsourcing Expertise Service provides the users not only with the tool but also with comprehensive support: fair expert community, project progress tracking and incentive system.

So the question is, why does this product stay unclaimed? How to motivate scientists use this service and are there any success stories existing?

[chris]

Good question. What examples can you supply of recent success stories?

[evan_au]

I guess crowdsourcing has always been used by scientific journals to peer-review papers submitted for publication.

There was recently another type of crowdsourcing scientific research in Australia.

The MOPRA telescope is mapping molecular dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way. But the government decided not to fund them to finish the task they had set themselves.

So they appealed to the general public, and managed to raise enough money to finish their initially planned survey (and a little bit more). So they survive another year, and will start to map molecular dust clouds further outside the plane of the galaxy (hopefully detecting any that might be heading our way...). http://mopra.org/

Crowdfunding is a little different than traditional science grant applications (eg "What design will be print on the T-Shirts?" and "How much should we charge to 'name' a molecular gas cloud?").

Crowdfunding has been used by the Planetary Society to fund a pilot solar sail, and another project proposing a satellite looking for Near-Earth Asteroids is also looking for public funding.

I guess anything that inspires the public to dip into their pockets to help science is a good thing (and more productive than the horse race that will have most Australians dipping into their pockets tomorrow).