Federal crowdsourcing programs at risk.

AuthorMagnuson, Stew
PositionTechnology Tomorrow

* The past five years have seen federal agencies embrace challenge prizes, citizen science and crowdsourcing as tools to advance technology and achieve their goals--all while saving a lot of funding.

The idea of awarding money to a person or team that achieves some kind of technological breakthrough goes back almost a century. The federal government sponsoring these prizes is relatively new, though.

Citizen science--asking the volunteers to perform tasks for the greater good--also has long roots, while crowdsourcing is more of a trend that began in the Information Age.

A legal framework for challenge prizes was established in the America Competes Act of 2010. But federally sponsored citizen science and crowdsourcing are the results of two Obama administration memoranda, the first in 2011. After five short years, the idea has spread to multiple agencies.

Representatives of these agencies gathered at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C, one week after the election to discuss how to transition crowdsourcing and citizen science to a new administration. The panel discussion was scheduled several weeks before the outcome of the election was known.

It attracted a large swath of federal employees from agencies that rely on the sciences to advance knowledge such as NASA, Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Representatives from the Office of Naval Research, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity attended as well as the CIA's Director of Science and Technology Jim Sullivan.

The fact that citizen science and crowdsourcing programs were established by the Obama administration in memoranda, and President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to undo many of his actions on his first day in office, was on the mind of many attendees.

The Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act of 2015, which would put these practices on more stable legal footing, was introduced by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. It was referred to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where it has languished for more than a year.

Wilson Center analysts produced a report, "Clearing the Path: Citizen Science and Public Decision Making in the United States," to explain the trend. It also published a shorter broadsheet with strategic recommendations for advancing the policies, programs and partnerships that the attendees could take back to their agencies to...

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