Zooinverse — A Service for All
You will meet some strange animals on Zooinverse, and that’s just the project owners!
Put together in the wonderful spirit of open source and commons good for all, Zooniverse offers students of various disciplines and all sorts of researchers a unique platform and tool to invite help from ordinary people in getting acquired data into a form or format for reuse and further processing.
Whether it’s a bunch of photos of your favourite mammals, or pictures of faraway stars, data acquired by primitive sensors, or letters from Shakespeare’s pals, you can use Zooinverse to classify, categorize, and transcribe. The platform allows you to upload your raw data and have volunteers work on it. The tool is relatively user friendly to build your project, it’s probably better to have some basic general IT experience or at least the right mindset. If you’ve built a blog using Wordpress, you won’t find this intimidating.
I used it recently just to put a draft project together, and thought it would be nicer than wire frames, and also got to test drive the platform and tool. The Zooniverse team not only offer an easy to follow sample project and step by step builder, but even some advice on how to make your tasks user friendly. For example, keep a workflow short and sweet, so that volunteers are not discouraged. People like to do short discrete sets of tasks which give an almost immediate sense of accomplishment.
My draft project is @ https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/agjryan/songstory
And a short review of one of the many fascinating projects is @ http://acadoodle.blogspot.ie/2015/12/the-digital-volunteer_9.html
plus some thoughts on crowdsourcing @
http://acadoodle.blogspot.ie/2015/11/many-hands-can-be-available.html
