One of nearly 1,500 Civilian Conservation Corps camps, this one in Beaverhead National Forest, Montana. The New Deal gave meaningful work and purpose to millions of people. Now we have the wisdom, tools, and technology to do even better.

Receiving an email at 4:45am isn’t usually cause for excitement. But for Mrs. Casuga, a high school teacher in Hayward, CA, it was a big deal.

This early-morning notification delivered unexpected and important news: her class project on DonorsChoose.org, a crowdfunding website for high school teachers, was fully funded. Her original goal? To raise $1,420 dollars to cover the field trip costs of a bus, lunch, and tickets to the California Academy of Sciences for her students, made up of mostly special needs students and many who speak English as a second language.

Like many educators, Mrs. Casuga had a dream to share a hands-on learning experience with her students at the California Academy of Sciences. She believed that if she could get her students into the museum, she had a shot at generating a life-long excitement in science. While Mrs. Casuga had a dream, she didn’t have the funds. But in the evening, somewhere around midnight, in one unexpected swoop, a generous donor contributed the final $1,000 to help Mrs. Casuga reach her goal. The trip was on.

Mrs. Casuga and her class were not alone that morning. They were swept up in a philanthropic tidal wave called the #BestSchoolDay wherein over 12,000 classrooms and teachers, across 47 states, had their funding needs met on DonorsChoose.org. The press release called it a “philanthropic flashmob.” But it wasn’t such a far-fetched idea. In many ways, it was an established philanthropic model. Matching grants aren’t anything extraordinary. NPR stations and others use the strategy to spur donations all the time. And non-profits and NGOs have always used large chunks of funding to support lots of local and smaller projects. That’s all old hat — Philanthropy 101. But #BestSchoolDay represents something different, in both scale and scope. I’ve been calling it “New Deal Philanthropy” — foundations and companies using technology-based platforms to amplify the important work being done by individuals and communities.

Our challenges and our political realities are different than those posed by the Great Depression, but they’re not entirely dissimilar. The future is uncertain and, for many, daunting. We’re facing a crisis of morale. New Deal Philanthropy isn’t about creating more government programs, a new social safety net, or adding regulation. It’s about being more ambitious with regards to creating meaningful work for everyone. It’s millions of moments like Mrs. Casuga’s morning email.

Debates about reviving manufacturing jobs, increasing the minimum wage, and a Universal Basic Income are all in the same neighborhood. Those discussions are important, and progressing. But New Deal Philanthropy is beyond the pilot phase, it’s ready to be scaled up now. Platforms like DonorsChoose, HandUp for helping homeless individuals with basic needs, and OpenExplorer for enabling citizen scientists are working now. And there’s room for a whole lot more.

Despite the name, the #BestSchoolDay was months — if not years — in the making. Charles Best, the company’s founder, started DonorsChoose.org as a crowdfunding site in 2000. A teacher himself, the site gave educators an easy and concise way to raise money for their classroom projects and needs. It wasn’t a particularly crazy idea. Crowdfunding has become a household term, with websites like Kickstarter being used to launch creative projects and GoFundMe used to cover medical expenses or family emergencies. DonorsChoose.org was born of that ilk, but with a specific focus on filling the gaps for teachers who are continually expected to do more with fewer resources.

It’s working. Over 325,000 teachers have funded projects this way, totaling over $480M. Individuals can contribute just a few dollars to a classroom in their community or area of interest. While DonorsChoose.org has garnered some high-profile support as one of Stephen Colbert’s preferred philanthropies, the model has never found the runaway momentum that Kickstarter has seen (for comparison, they’ve raised more than $2.7B for creative projects). Sadly, funding classroom projects hasn’t had the allure that films and technology gadgets have, so Charles and the team began looking for other novel ways to fill the funding gaps. One of the most fruitful ideas was convincing more traditional philanthropists — high net worth individuals or celebrities — to step in. The pitch: “there are X number of unfunded classroom projects in your city, you could write a check for Y and all of these classrooms get the resources they need” — simple, straight forward.

The team then gathered dozens of philanthropists and celebrities together and focused their attention on a single day of classroom-funding action — the #BestSchoolDay. It was community boosting at it’s finest. It was also a glimpse into a new potential future for philanthropy, away from the competition-based, moonshot craze of the past decade, and towards a model that is more rooted in community and collaboration. The trend is being driven by three main forces: Trust, Small-First, and Tools.

Trust

The way we trust others has changed, and technology is the difference. More accurately: it’s enabling the difference. New tools and platforms are allowing us to trust strangers in completely new and exciting ways. We already have good examples of this outside of philanthropy: sharing our houses with strangers on AirBnB, driving for Uber, or pooling money together from hundreds of backers for a creative project on Kickstarter. The novelty isn’t the financial transaction — room renting, car sharing and art patronage has been around for centuries — the novelty is rather in the level of trust we’re willing to extend to strangers because the apps and algorithms provide a filter. Rachel Botsman, a leading researcher and author on the subject, recently gave a TED Talk on the evolution of trust:

“I am not saying we do not need hotels or traditional forms of authority. But what we cannot deny is that the way trust flows through society is changing, and it’s creating this big shift away from the 20th century that was defined by institutional trust towards the 21st century that will be fueled by distributed trust. Trust is no longer top-down. It’s being unbundled and inverted. It’s no longer opaque and linear. A new recipe for trust is emerging that once again is distributed amongst people and is accountability-based.”

Philanthropy runs on trust. NGOs strive for effectiveness and transparency, vying for ratings on sites like Charity Navigator and GiveWell. For obvious reasons, a foundation or organization is only going to give a grant to an entity they believe in.

The impact of scaling trust with technology has a number of implications for philanthropy. It solves non-obvious bottlenecks for both grant makers and receivers. The traditional process goes something like this: a grant writer at a non-profit submits their lengthy proposal to a program officer or review committee at a foundation, which then goes through numerous approvals for relevance, merit and legality. Small non-profits commonly expresses frustration with the significant amount of time it takes to write grant proposals, and because of this, many teams have full-time or part-time staff devoted exclusively to it. The infrastructure required to both apply for and administer a grant is not insignificant, and it takes away from the actual non-profit work being proposed.

But that traditional process is changing dramatically with something new — augmented trust.

Here’s how DonorsChoose does it: teachers pick out the materials they need and write 3–4 paragraphs on what they need and why. Teacher volunteers working with DonorsChoose screen each project to ensure it makes sense and the essay accurately describes the items they requested. With teacher profiles and links to past projects and comments, there is community-level vetting of the viability of the project. When the project reaches full funding, DonorsChoose then orders the school/project supplies through Amazon and other channels, and sends them to the teacher. With this precise combination of steps — each one relatively easy for the teacher — the risk of fraud is reduced dramatically, if not eliminated entirely. DonorsChoose.org is a crowdfunding site, certainly, but it’s also a trust factory.

Small-First

With DonorsChoose as a platform, individual teachers essentially become their own non-profit entities. They don’t need a grant writer, administrator, or 501c(3) status. They just create their page on the site, and adhere to the guidelines and requirements. There are hundreds of thousands of Mrs. Casugas. DonorsChoose has a staff of just eighty. That’s incredible leverage.

Traditional grant-making faces a tricky threshold problem. Each proposal, no matter the size, has to go through the same legal review, which can cost thousands of dollars. This has the unfortunate effect of making smaller grant amounts unreasonable, simply because of the administrative fees. Theoretically, smaller amounts would mean that a foundation or company could spread the grants over a wider number of projects. Augmented trust enables this by dramatically reducing the overhead costs. Less overhead means that grant amounts can get a lot smaller. With teachers serving as their own advocates, and foundations avoiding the costly process of reviewing the merit and legality of each grant-receiving entity, even small amounts of money can go directly to the important work, as opposed to indirect fees like grant writing and administration.

Small amounts of money can go a very long way. Mrs. Casuga only needed $1,420 for a life-changing experience for her kids. But this goes beyond classrooms. I’ve seen the effects first hand. Five years ago, my friend Eric Stackpole and I were building a prototype of an underwater robot in his garage. Our idealistic goal was to democratize ocean exploration and science by creating a low-cost underwater drone. We called it OpenROV. Problem was: we were broke. We only had a few hundred dollars between the two of us. And buying parts, even inexpensive parts, to build the robot were daunting decisions. Eventually, a mutual friend made an introduction to someone at the Schmidt Ocean Institute. We quickly learned that the institute wasn’t organized to support smaller projects like ours, as their non-profit was designed to support the R/V Falkor and the ongoing work of research scientists around the world. But when we told them what we needed — just a few thousand dollars to help complete the prototype — they got creative and made it work. And so did we. We finished the prototype, started a company, and have raised almost $1M on Kickstarter. We’ve since shipped thousands of underwater robots around the world and Google Scholar returns over a hundred mentions of OpenROV in academic papers. In terms of the advancement of ocean science and conservation, that micro-grant turned out to be a fantastic investment.

At some point, the ability to go small completely rearranges the strategy. As philanthropy enters this new territory, it’s possible to take cues from adjacent sectors. Startup investing, for example, has undergone a dramatic shift towards the small-first strategy. Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in “startup accelerators” that offer founders and companies relatively small amounts of investment money (as compared to traditional larger venture amounts), combined that with a community of support, and a program of introductions and education. This trend was started by the success of Y Combinator, a program that has now funded almost a thousand early-stage companies with a cumulative valuation of over $60 billion dollars. The original hypothesis was simple: the cost of starting and launching a company was dramatically reduced thanks to platform technologies like Amazon Cloud Services and the iPhone, and it no longer required huge infrastructure investments. Instead of making a few big bets, Y-Combinator’s investors spread themselves very thin, making hundreds of smaller bets knowing that it was very difficult to predict which would prove to have the biggest return. Small-first allows for the businesses, even the crazy ideas, to prove themselves worthy of ongoing investment.

As we continue this societal trust shift, there are hopeful signs that philanthropy will evolve, too. The Schmidt Family Foundation, building off the lessons they learned with us and others, have started a new program: Schmidt Marine Technology Partners. They’re applying the Y Combinator model to philanthropy, specifically related to the technology used to explore, study, and protect our oceans, which are under constant threat. The Schmidt Marine Technology Partners now have an inaugural class of projects, together going through a program of education and collaboration.

Tools & Platforms
These experiments, like #BestSchoolDay and Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, are still early days. There is still much to learn, both from success and failure. But the way forward is interesting enough to press on. Already, we’re understanding some of the important factors. There are two main ingredients: tools and platforms.

Having affordable tools and materials isn’t necessarily obvious. But DonorsChoose.org wouldn’t work if they had to buy the buses, manufacture the notebooks or build the museums. They need affordability. More importantly, they need it to be accessible. By using Amazon and other partners, they have access to almost any tool or service that a teacher could possibly need, along with the shipping and logistics infrastructure to get it to the classroom. They’re just connecting the dots in an important way.

As we unpacked the lessons we learned starting OpenROV, we realized that the low-cost tools were a major part of the story. There was a variety of components that — all of a sudden — had become affordable building blocks: miniature linux computers, cheap sensors and cameras, and digital fabrication tools like 3D printers and laser cutters. The “maker movement” had created a scaffolding that we could build on. We, too, were connecting dots: utilizing a network of maker spaces and online communities to help us create our initial design.

If this type of philanthropy is to succeed outside of the public school system, it’s going to be contingent on the availability of affordable tools. If it’s going to work in the areas of science and conservation, which is our goal and mission, OpenROV can’t be an isolated story. Luckily, it’s not. There are a number of other groups and individuals who are now designing and building low-cost tools for science and exploration: the Rainforest Connection device for detecting illegal logging with broken cell phones, the Foldscope origami microscope, the Open qPCR machine. All sorts of these new devices have popped up on Kickstarter in the past few years. Many more are coming.

Taking a cue from DonorsChoose.org, we wanted to pay it forward by giving other citizen scientists a place to share their hopes, dreams, and ideas. We created OpenExplorer as a digital field journal that allows anyone with a question or mission to share their expedition online. The goal was to shift from what we were building together at OpenROV to what we were exploring and studying together. Early on, we recognized the importance of community, and have started OpenExplorer “Initiatives” to help group together like-minded explorers, whether they’re students or citizen scientists or fisherman. Our vision is a world where everyone has a role to play in the scientific process. We’re turning to community boosting to fund that future. We’re expanding out beyond just underwater robots, too, because of the synergy with our community and those of other tool-builders. Our goal is to create a 21st century Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the most popular of the New Deal programs, which enlisted more than three million people (unfortunately it was just men), planted nearly three billion trees, and built more than 800 parks and similar facilities.

So far, the results have been promising. Our first initiative, where we sent out OpenROV kits, helped over 50 different teams achieve their goals, from a citizen scientist contributing to research of an unknown disease affecting sea stars in the Pacific Northwest to a community group working with local fisherman to create a marine reserve in the Gulf of Mexico. We recently re-designed the site, and have a handful of new initiatives, with dozens more planned for the coming months. We’re hoping these initiatives embolden and connect a new generation of explorers all over the world. Moreover, we hope this model of community boosting philanthropy takes hold. It’s happened before.

In 1996, Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur in the space industry, created the first XPRIZE for suborbital spaceflight. Not content with the state of the industry or the pace of innovation, Diamandis staged a competition with a $10 million prize for any company or group who could build and fly a vehicle 100 kilometers into space twice within a two week time frame.

He was actually dusting off an old playbook. He got the inspiration for the idea from a similar effort in the 1919 by French hotelier Raymond Orteig, who offered up a $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight between New York City and Paris. The competition was won almost a decade later, in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh completed the journey with the Spirit of St. Louis.

Diamandis stunt fared similarly well. In 2004, the inaugural XPRIZE was won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures with their spacecraft SpaceShipOne. And like the Orteig Prize before it, the competition was extraordinarily successful at leveraging investment capital. In the end, the Orteig prize spurred the collective investment of over $400,000 by nine different teams, an order of magnitude increase on the originally promised prize. XPRIZE, too, resulted in over $100 million in invested capital towards the goal from the field of competitors. That kind of straightforward, leveraged impact turned out to be a huge selling point for XPRIZE as it began courting billionaires and companies to sponsor a whole host of new challenges, everything from ocean acidification measurements to landing a vehicle on the moon.

The success of XPRIZE and Diamandis’ campaigning for the idea sent the world into a competition craze. Companies, philanthropists, and even the federal government began using competitions as a way to leverage impact and crowd source solutions. It’s been a great tool. For some problems, the competition model just works. But it’s not a cure-all.

Earlier this year, the MacArthur Foundation announced 100&Change, a “competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that will make measurable progress toward solving a significant problem.”

The foundation didn’t specify what problem they wanted competitors to solve, just that it be a critical issue. They seem to have purposely left a lot of room for interpretation of what that could mean. Regardless of which group they choose and whether or not they’re able to make measurable progress toward their issue, the contest is already important. It’s the grand finale of prize competitions — the ultimate test for a philanthropic philosophy that has nowhere left to go.

I suspect this may be the high-water mark for moonshot philanthropy. I hope the pendulum swings back to experimenting with ideas that motivate and inspire entire generations — not just small teams — to get involved and (quickly) get to work on important issues, instead of just looking for heroic, technological silver bullets. AirBnB and Uber have laid out the blueprints — they’ve shown us how augmented trust can put millions of people to work, quickly. Now, our generational challenge is to make that more than just a paycheck. We can use the same tools to provide meaning and purpose.

In ten years, we might look back at #BestSchoolDay as we do the initial Ansari XPRIZE — ushering in an entirely new genre of philanthropy. We’ll have a new 100&Change competition, not to write one big check, but to embolden 100,000 more Mrs. Casugas with $1,000. Ultimately, using her own words, “expanding the size and scope of the futures they imagine.”

New Deal Philanthropy was originally published in What’s The Future? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of all the serious challenges facing the world’s oceans, one stands above all the rest: ignorance. There simply aren’t enough people who engage with and care about the plight of our planet’s largest ecosystem. And it makes complete sense. Most people don’t interact with the ocean in a meaningful way, and haven’t fallen in love with the wonder and life that exists beneath the surface.

“People only protect what they love.” - Jacques Cousteau

With only six million registered scuba divers around the world, we need to continue to seek new forms of innovative ocean engagement. The award-winning naturalist E.O. Wilson offered a vision in his book Half Earth:

“In viewing the future this way, I wish to suggest a means to achieve almost free enjoyment of the world’s best places in the biosphere that I and my fellow naturalists have identified. The cost-benefit ratio would be extremely small. It requires only a thousand or so high-resolution cameras (small and unobtrusive, thanks to the continuing information technology revolution) that broadcast live around the clock from sites within reserves. People would still visit any reserve in the world physically, but they could also travel there virtually and in continuing real time with no more than a few keystrokes in their homes, schools, and lecture halls. Perhaps a Serengeti water hole at dawn? Or the diel cycles of a teeming Amazon canopy? There would also be available streaming video of summer daytime on the coast in the shallow offshore waters of Antarctica, and cameras that continuously travel through the great coral triangles of Indonesia and New Guinea. With species identifications and brief expert commentaries unobtrusively added, the adventure would be forever changing, and safe.”

This future is closer than many realize. Our company, OpenROV, is one of many helping to build this new infrastructure of exploration and science, by manufacturing low-cost underwater drones that can dive to 100m and stream live video onto the internet. After raising $815,000 on Kickstarter last year, we’re set to achieve Wilson’s goal of a thousand cameras by several fold by mid-summer.

I gave a talk at TED 2015 about the growing trend of DIY science. The talk was posted in the TED Archives, and I’m posting the full transcription here:

Last year, one of my heroes passed away. John Dobson, the original sidewalk astronomer, was 98 years old. He’ll be best remembered for his namesake design, which was called the Dobsonian Telescope. It’s a unique, novel way of mounting larger lenses using whatever materials happen to be lying around.

Dobson was not an engineer. He was not even a classically-trained astronomer. In fact, he began his young career as a monk. When his telescope-building hobby became too much of a distraction, the monastery forced him to choose between the two. Lucky for all of us, he chose telescopes.

He never patented his design, never tried to make money off of it, but he dedicated himself to teaching everyone and anyone the methods and the joy of building their own. He spent the rest of his life standing on street corners, traveling around the world, and inviting everyone he met to look up into the stars.

More than just an inventor, Dobson was a pioneer in the realm of amateur science. His formula—low-cost, DIY tools, and a community and culture of collaboration—has been one of the major reasons that amateurs have been able to make so many important contributions to the field. It’s not a difficult formula; it’s very simple, but it’s been very hard for other scientific disciplines to replicate until very recently. Over the past few years, across the board, the tools for doing science and exploration and conservation have become more accessible and more powerful.

A local community in Borneo builds DIY drones to monitor and protect their rainforest. A new origami microscope that costs less than the cost of postage gives rise to a community of tens of thousands of people who are experimenting and exploring the microcosmos. After the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, a group of makers and hackers get together to create Safecast. They build their own Geiger Counters and map the impacts in real time.

DIY biologists are now competing in international design competitions with their engineered microbes, all the while building new, low-cost tools to power the growing number of garage wet labs. The list of examples goes on and on. The walls between questions and answers are being torn down by groups with these open-source tools. We don’t have a good name for this trend yet, but it’s coming on fast. I think calling it science might be too high of a bar, but just in the same way you wouldn’t call all of the cat videos on YouTube films … I should be careful because some people probably might … you can’t ignore the phenomenon.

What the internet did to movies and music and journalism and manufacturing, it’s now turning onto the process of discovery. The combination of cheap sensors, open standards, and most importantly, connected enthusiasm, is unleashing the long tail of curiosity. It’s a new era of connected exploration. If you thought that smart thermostats were cool, then you’re going to love this. Because this isn’t about efficiency and convenience; this is about wonder and this is about adventure.

I’ve experienced this flood of amateur enthusiasm and interest firsthand. A few years ago my friend Eric and I built an underwater robot in his garage in Cupertino. We shared the design online and found thousands of other people who shared our passion for low-cost ocean exploration.

Six months ago we launched a site called OpenExplorer, a digital field journal designed to give our community a way to share not just what we were building together but what we were exploring. In that short time we’ve seen everything from the discovery of shipwrecks in Australia to the pursuit of lost Incan cities in Peru. It’s gone far beyond the underwater realm as well. There’s a field biologist in Mojave who’s building internet-connected rovers to monitor and protect the endangered desert tortoise. There are makers and scientists who are going into the jungles of Madagascar with soldering irons and microcontrollers to push the limits of remote sensing for research and conservation. We’re watching these weird and wild and interesting stories unfold right before our eyes.

The rules for these new methods are being written right now. One thing so far is already clear: When you give people the tools to ask questions, they will surprise you with what they ask, and with what they discover.

How DIY Science is Changing the World was originally published in OpenExplorer Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ocean exploration is expensive business. That’s why hardly anyone does it. Despite the well-known fact that over 71% of our planet is covered by ocean and we’ve explored less than 5% of it, a relatively small amount of both federal and private funding goes towards the tools and vessels necessary to explore the depths. In fact, a large part of the federal ocean exploration budget (between $20–30 million annually) goes towards supporting only two ships: The Okeanos Explorer and the E.V. Nautilus.

Obviously, having only two ships leaves a lot to be desired. To be fair, though, both of them accomplish an incredible amount given the enormity of the task. Whether you measure it by days at sea, scientific discoveries enabled, or views on social media, the productivity and effectiveness of these crews is not in question. That tax payer money is going a long way — literally.

Technology has made it go a lot further, too. Mostly with robots and the internet, and mostly thanks to Dr. Robert Ballard. Dr. Ballard, most famous for discovering the Titanic, began his career “the hard way” on research vessels and diving in manned submersibles, notably Alvin, but eventually realized a paradigm shift was needed in order to eliminate inefficiencies. He pioneered the use of telepresence as a technique for exploring the depths of the ocean. Instead of the lone submarine missions, limited to just a few lucky researchers, they used Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and connected them to the internet to turn the research vessels into a real-time, connected observation platforms. The telepresence model has allowed scientists from all over the world to collaborate and contribute, not to mention created a boon for educators in classrooms across the world. More than his laundry list of scientific and archaeologic discoveries (which are incredible, almost unparalleled), Dr. Ballard should be remember for how he changed the process of ocean exploration through telepresence.

Eric Stackpole, the creator of OpenROV, was drinking the same Kool-Aid. From our very first meeting in 2010, he told me — without hesitation or uncertainty — his life’s purpose was to promote telerobotics as a tool for exploration. In the past five years, I’ve watched him turn this:

An early underwater robot prototype that barely worked. Into this:

The new OpenROV Trident, an extraordinary leap forward for low-cost underwater drones. Eric’s vision, which I’ve supported since I met him, has been to make sure everyone has access to this technology. We’re not far from that goal.

Over the past week, I’ve watched Eric take another step in the direction of democratized exploration as he’s been rigging up his inflatable boat for next week’s expedition to the wreck of the SS Tahoe. I first noticed the boat set up in the kitchen of OpenROV HQ. Over the weekend, Eric tested the setup in Lake Tahoe.

You can read the full write-up on the system HERE.

And you can follow along with the SS Tahoe Wreck Expedition HERE.

Best to view Eric’s setup as a prototype to what’s to come. All in, the whole setup — an internet-connected ocean exploration platform — costs less than $10,000 (less the acoustic positioning transducer). Of course, the OpenROVs can only go to 100m of depth, but there’s a North America-sized area of ocean at that depth or shallower. Imagine thousands of these micro-exploration vessels operated by citizen scientists: patrolling marine protected areas, monitoring fisheries, or searching for submerged cultural heritage.

I like that future.

Build Your Own DIY Ocean Research Vessel was originally published in OpenExplorer Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Maker Movement had humble beginnings, too. We can grow this globally if we all work together. Check out this chart for inspiration:

http://makerfaire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Maker-Faire-Growth-Chart-20151.pdf

Three years ago, I received an intriguing Facebook message from a young postdoctoral researcher at CalTech. His name was Cory Tobin, and he was responding to an introduction made by our mutual friend, Mac Cowell. Mac had told me an incomplete but compelling story about the research Cory was doing in his apartment. The long but worthwhile message is below.

September 9
Cory Tobin
9/9/2013, 1:54am

OK, I don’t want to make any assumptions about your bio/chem knowledge so I’ll just give you my typical spiel starting from the basics. Don’t be offended if you already know this stuff. Anyways, here it is…

All living stuff needs nitrogen to build proteins. Nitrogen is quite abundant in the atmosphere (78%) but it’s in the form of N2 which is a very stable molecule, so using it directly is near impossible. Humans get some nitrogen from plant proteins or more so from meat which, while the meat was still alive, got it from eating plants. Most plants get nitrogen from the soil either in the form of ammonium, nitrates, free amino acids or to a lesser degree, nitrites. These compounds are mostly the result of other decaying organisms. But where did it come from originally? At some point someone had to get it from the atmosphere, otherwise there would be a net loss as these nitrogen-containing compounds are washed into the ocean or converted into nitrogen gas and return to the atmosphere.

Before humans started interfering the only terrestrial source of nitrogen (I will ignore the ocean for now) was root nodules in some species of plants. There are bacteria that live in these nodules which convert N2 (gaseous nitrogen) from the atmosphere into NH3 (ammonium) which the plant can easily use. It’s a symbiotic relationship where the plant supplies a cozy environment for the bacteria as well as carbohydrates from photosynthesis while the bacteria produce ammonia which is quickly converted into amino acids. The reason for the nodule is that the bacterial enzymes which do the N2 ==> NH3 reaction, called “nitrogenases”, are poisoned by oxygen. The nodule provides an environment relatively free of O2 so the enzymes can work efficiently.

On a related tangent, one of the primary ingredients in fertilizer is ammonium nitrate. This is produced through the Haber process where natural gas is used to heat gaseous N2 up to high temperatures in the presence of a catalyst to make various nitrogen compounds. Supposedly around 2% of the world’s total energy supply is used in this single chemical reaction, although I have yet to actually find solid data on this.

Anyways, farmers spray this stuff in their fields to improve yield but a lot of it goes to waste as it runs off into waterways causing toxic algae blooms and eventually into the sea where it causes more problems for ocean life. Back to the story…

For these bacteria and their nitrogenases to work they need an oxygen free environment. So you can’t just take the bacteria and coat a plant with it and hope for it to work.

Only some species of plants have nodules to sustain nitrogen fixation. And unfortunately the plants that humans grow in the largest abundance (maize, rice, wheat) don’t have nodules. People have been trying to engineer root nodules into non-nodulating species for some time without much luck. Turns out it’s quite a complex phenomenon. Ideally you could make a plant produce nodules so farmers don’t have to dump so much fertilizer everywhere, either by some special seed coating or through genetic modification. But so far, no luck. The only thing I have seen recently that could be promising is this company — azotictechnologies.com I kind of know what they are working on but I have yet to see any data showing that it can replace fertilizer.

One possible way to sidestep this nodule problem is to come up with a nitrogenase which is oxygen tolerant. Then you wouldn’t have to deal with engineering or inducing nodulation. You could imagine if you had such a system you could possibly just put the gene straight into the plant so there is no bacteria needed, or maybe make a seed coating containing some bacterial spores carrying this gene, etc. Something way simpler than making root nodules and less polluting and wasteful than fertilizer.

Back in the 90s there was this professor in Germany, Ortwin Meyer, who happened to find a bacteria that ostensibly fixed nitrogen in the presence of oxygen. He and his team were actually looking for bacteria that reduced carbon monoxide and discovered this nitrogenase by accident. In Germany people make charcoal by burying firewood and igniting underground so it undergoes pyrolysis, expelling all sorts of nasty gases and leaving behind charcoal. Meyer et al took some soil samples from atop one of these charcoal “heaps”, for lack of a better word. One of the bacteria he isolated from the soil consumed carbon monoxide but also fixed nitrogen. They called it Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus.

At some point all of the students and postdocs left the lab and no one carried on the project studying the nitrogenase function. I contacted everyone who had ever worked on it and they all claimed to no longer have the species. I don’t believe them, but it’s irrelevant. So it seemed that the species was lost. After getting the runaround from all those folks I decided to try to re-isolate the species myself. This is where I got incredibly lucky. I should have bought a lotto ticket this day. I was talking to one of my German friends, Dirk, about this project trying to determine if I had committed some cultural faux pas which might explain why these scientists were being difficult and cagey. He told me that his dad’s neighbor owns a charcoal “factory” in the region where S. thermoautotrophicus had been isolated. Dirk gave him a call and it turns out this guy owns the exact property where Meyer had isolated that species. So this guy sends me a soil sample from one of his charcoal heaps for me to try to re-isolate this species from.

This brings up the question of how do I go about re-isolating the bacteria. From the literature I knew the basic approach was to place the soil sample in a flask, cover it with a little bit of water containing some salts, minerals and other micronutrients, heat it up to 65C and then pump in the gases which this species loves to eat. It consumes either carbon monoxide or a combination of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Since working with CO in my apartment (this was all done DIY style) was out of the question I went with H2/CO2. My initial design involved an airtight growth chamber with heating element, hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water and CO2 delivered from a canister, through some tubes and valves connected to the chamber. This thing was a complete disaster and I never got it to run for more than a couple of days before some part became too corroded from the high temperature, humidity and corrosive gas.

My second design was centered around a plastic cooler that I picked up from Target. There was a heat lamp inside controlled via a relay and an Arduino which maintained the balmy 65C temperature. The soil sample sat inside a flask with the appropriate mix of vitamins and minerals. To generate the gases I had 2 large plastic cups, 1 for hydrogen and 1 for carbon dioxide. To produce hydrogen I placed aluminum powder in the cup, then poured in 1M NaOH. To produce carbon dioxide I went kindergarten-science-fair-style and mixed baking soda and vinegar. So I would dump the liquids into the powders and then shut the cooler lid quickly to trap the gases in. I would do this twice a day to keep the concentration of the gases up. Eventually I got some bacteria to grow which matched the description of the original species. So I had isolated what appeared to be the original O2-tolerant nitrogen fixing bacteria.

In the meantime, since I had been publishing all this on a public wiki, I got the attention of a couple of other scientists who were interested in helping out. Our collaboration has managed to confirm that this bacteria is indeed fixing nitrogen. We did this by growing it in the presence of isotopic 15-N2, which is a non-radioactive isotope of nitrogen that occurs very rarely in nature. We extracted proteins from the bacteria and ran it though a mass spectrometer. The mass spec showed that the 15N was incorporated into proteins so we know it’s fixing nitrogen. We have also sequenced the genome of this bacterium which turned out more difficult than initially planned, but it’s mostly done. Now the goal is twofold: 1) figure out which genes code for the nitrogenase and 2) determine if the nitrogenase is in fact O2 tolerant. The original research on this species was inconclusive so we have to make sure.

Right now we’re addressing #1 by using RNA-Seq to basically measure which genes are turned on when the bacteria is forced to fix its own nitrogen (be removing ammonia from the growth media). So we grow one sample with ammonia and one without, then measure the level of expression for all the genes (RNA-Seq), compare the 2 samples and see which ones are turned up when ammonia is removed. These genes *should* be the ones involved in the nitrogenase pathway but biology is always messy and complicated so it probably won’t be so conclusive. Eventually we will have to make knockouts, where we remove genes that we think are involved and see if it kills the nitrogenase function to be 100% sure.

As for #2, that is on the back burner for now because it will be very difficult to test without #1.

My ultimate goal is to be able to take a set of genes from Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus and put them in another species, either a plant or an algae or something and have that species fix its own nitrogen too. It would be super useful not only in the agriculture sector but also in industrial algae biofuel operations.

So if you got antsy and skipped to the end, the goal is to engineer biological systems to not need nitrogen-based fertilizer. We’re still a ways away from that goal but making steady progress.

If you have any questions let me know. I’m always happy to talk science. Sorry for the novella.

His story immediately struck me as important. More than the research itself, which was compelling, it was how Cory was pursuing it that stood out to me. He was working outside the system. He wasn’t doing this in a university lab or corporate R&D facility. This was a guy in his apartment asking a question. He wasn’t dependent on grant cycles or pressured to release a peer-reviewed paper. He was free to follow the facts and evidence wherever they led. He sent me an email this week with an update:

Last time we talked I had just received positive results from our mass spectrometer that the bacteria was in fact fixing nitrogen. We ended up determining that those results were an artifact of contamination. After elimination of the contamination source it became apparent that this species was not fixing nitrogen. So we ended up doing a lot of work to figure out how this species was previously mischaracterized. It has a really interesting genome and is really really good at looking like a nitrogen fixer but unfortunately does not do anything industrially useful as far as we can see.

By the end there were 5 universities involved and two grants from the NSF and RCUK. Not too shabby for a project started on my apartment balcony. We ended up publishing a paper in February. Hopefully that paper, even though its all negative results, will prevent future scientists from sinking tons of resources into this bug.

I think Cory is underselling himself. He’s right — the results will help future scientists avoid undue effort. But he’s also done a tremendous amount to build the infrastructure for more independent research and discovery. Since finishing his postdoc, Cory took over as president of the LA Biohackers group, a ragtag group of like-minded DIYBio enthusiasts, and rebranded it as TheLab, creating a more capable space and resource for citizen science.

Cory and TheLab go a long way in dispelling the myth that citizen science is all about untrained amateurs collecting data for professional studies. The real story is much more exciting: low-cost tools and coordinated, connected enthusiasm are creating a new model for research and discovery — for everyone. In addition to the amateurs, citizen science is also about indie scientists finding alternate paths to their research goals. It’s worth adding to Michael Eisen’s poignant quote:

“It is an amazing time to do science, but an incredibly difficult time to be a scientist.”

It’s also a thrilling time to be a citizen scientist.

How citizen science bridges the gap between science and society.

It’s hard to find a silver lining in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The striking images of jugs of brown water being held high in protest are a symbol of institutional failure on a grand scale. It’s a disaster. But even as questions of accountability and remedy remain unanswered, there is already one lesson we can take away: Citizen science can be used as a powerful tool to build (or rebuild) the public’s trust in science.

Because the other striking image from Flint is this: Citizen-scientists sampling and testing their own water, from their homes and neighborhoods, and reporting the results as scientific data. Dr. Marc Edwards is the Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who led the investigation into the lead levels in Flint’s water supply, and in a February 2016 interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, he gave an important answer about the methods his team used to obtain the data: “Normal people really appreciate good science that’s done in their interest. They stepped forward as citizen-scientists to explore what was happening to them and to their community, we provided some funding and the technical and analytical expertise, and they did all the work. I think that work speaks for itself.”

It’s a subtle but important message: The community is rising up and rallying by using science, not by reacting to it. Other scientists trying to highlight important issues and influence public opinion would do well to take note, because there’s a disconnect between what science reports and what the general public chooses to believe. For instance, 97 percent of scientists agree that the world’s climate is warming, likely due to human activities. Yet only 70 percent of Americans believe that global warming is real. Many of the most important issues of our time have the same, growing gap between scientific and societal consensus: genetically modified foods, evolution, vaccines are often widely distrusted or disputed despite strong, positive scientific evidence.

The causes for the disconnect are long and sordid. Activist lobbying groups have focused and skewed the conversation, while scientists’ communication efforts (or lack thereof) struggle to be heard above the noise. Meanwhile, an ineffective education system practically ensures that levels of scientific understanding are minimal. There’s more than enough blame to go around. But those of us looking to come up with a solution to the problem need to do more than just plug the holes. We need to figure out how to actively build trust.

The difference between “here are the results of a study” and “please help us in the process of discovery” is profound.

The good news is that we’re learning. Citizen science — the growing trend of involving non-professional scientists in the process of discovery — is proving to be a supremely effective tool. It now includes far more than birders and backyard astronomers, its first amateur champions. Over the past few years, the discipline has been gaining traction and popularity in academic circles too. Involving groups of amateur volunteers is now a proven strategy for collecting data over large geographic areas or over long periods of time. Online platforms like Zooniverse have shown that even an untrained human eye can spot anomalies in everything from wildebeest migrations to Martian surfaces. For certain types of research, citizen science just works.

While a long list of peer-reviewed papers now backs up the efficacy of citizen science, and a series of papers has shown its positive impact on students’ view of science, we’re just beginning to understand the impact of that participation on the wider perception of science. Truthfully, for now, most of what we know so far about its public impact is anecdotal, as in the work in Flint, or even on our online platform for explorers, OpenExplorer.

There, I’ve seen Laura James become something of a citizen science folk hero as she rallied attention to the problem of Sea Star Wasting Syndrome in the Puget Sound. By adding citizen science, the story became about much more than just bad news about the environment. There were clear and specific ways for people to get involved as scientists worked to find out what was causing the mass die-off of sea stars. The scientific method became the message. Citizen scientists also changed the way the story was covered by media outlets — it became an important public interest story. The coverage even inspired Congressman Denny Heck to introduce the Marine Disease Emergency Act to Congress. Something similar is now happening with sick sea turtles around Hawaii.

It makes sense that citizen science should affect public perception of science. The difference between “here are the results of a study” and “please help us in the process of discovery” is profound. It’s the difference between a rote learning moment and an immersive experience. And even if not everyone is getting involved, the fact that this is possible and that some members of a community are engaging makes science instantly more relatable. It creates what Tim O’Reilly calls an “architecture of participation.” Citizen scientists create the best interface for convincing the rest of the populace.

A recent article in Nature argued that the DIY biology community was, in fact, ahead of the scientific establishment in terms of proactively thinking about the safety and ethics of rapidly advancing biotechnology tools. They had to be. For those people opening up community labs so that anyone can come and participate, public health issues can’t be pushed aside or dealt with later. After all, they are the public that will be affected.

Beyond peer-reviewed papers, these stories are inspiring communities and instigating important conversations and political action. It’s deep, sustained involvement. Of course, this model isn’t right for all types of science, but it is an important step toward democratizing science and building greater comprehension. All scientists, especially those working on conservation and community health issues, should be adding this method to their toolbox. Hopefully, with more citizen science projects like these, science can continue to build more of the public trust it desperately needs.

A version of this article was originally published on the TED Ideas blog.

The TED Fellows program hand-picks innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.

How Citizen Science Bridges the Gap Between Science and Society was originally published in TED Fellows on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The amateur has a bit of an identity crisis. Not any specific amateur, more the idea. Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition:

am·a·teur
: a person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job
: a person who does something poorly : a person who is not skillful at a job or other activity

If the two meanings were any more divergent, they’d completely contradict themselves. Looking at the origin of the word — French for “lover of” — it seems they both miss the mark. The Wikipedia explanation goes in a different direction, citing Leonardo Da Vinci as an amateur artist and Charles Darwin an amateur scientist, which is pretty decorated lineage to be considered “not skillful.”

My interpretation of the word has evolved over the years and has been equally confusing. Growing up, I always thought it meant shoddy or second rate. But as I delved deeper into the maker world, and now this new world of citizen science, my perspective has changed. The idea moved closer to the “lover of” meaning. My personal definition is an even broader understanding, one that spans the blunders of a beginner to the genius of Darwin:

An amateur is someone who works outside of the established institutions and formal guidelines. They work on their terms, sometimes without compensation, but always in pursuit of a bigger idea: beauty, truth, pleasure, etc.

This has worked for me.

However, today I was re-reading A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold’s classic book on conservation and land ethics, and decided I like his way of explaining it better. Quotes from his “A Man’s Leisure Time” chapter:

“A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary. It is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked.”

“It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek or need rational justification. To wish to do it is reason enough. To find reasons why it is useful or beneficial converts it at once from an avocation into an industry — lowers it at once to the ignominious category of an ‘excercise’ undertaken for health, power, or profit. Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of liberty.”

“A good hobby, in these times, is one that entails either making something or making the tools to make it with, and then using it to accomplish some needless thing.”

“A good hobby must also be a gamble.”

“A good hobby may be a solitary revolt against the common-place, or it be the joint conspiracy of a congenial group… In either event it is a rebellion, and if a hopeless one, all the better.”

Amen.

(And do read the whole book.)

On Amateurs was originally published in Invironment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.