engaging many minds: crowdsourcing in academia
DESCRIPTION
Presenting a crowdsourcing approach that enables open brainstorming for the best research projects at the University of California, San Francisco.TRANSCRIPT
Engaging Many Minds
Katja Reuter*, Rachael Sak, Maninder Kahlon
*Presenter: Manager, Online Communications, Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI), University of California, San Francisco
Crowdsourcing: Virtual Community Collaborations in Academia
Expanding Communications ...
to enable new ways for researchers to interact, communicate and collaborate.
Website
Resources, Databases
E-Mail Service
Presenting Information Online
Research
Networking
Tools
Crowdsourcing
Tools
Research
Blogs
Catalyzing and Enabling New Ways for Researchers to:
• Communicate
• Interact
• Collaborate
...
Using a crowdsourcing approach to enable idea generation as a collaborative endeavor.
Transforming the types of research questions
that are generated and how teams are convened.
What is Crowdsourcing?
“the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to an undefined, large group of people or
community (a "crowd"), through an open call”.
WIKIPEDIA
Finding and leveraging the enormous potential of the “collective brain”
has a history outside of research.
Inspiration
Crowdsourcing models used in Industry
• e.g. IBM, Netflix, InnoCentive
Bestselling books and articles
• “The wisdom of crowds” (James Surowiecki, 2005)
• “The rise of crowdsourcing” (Jeff Howe, Wired, 2006)
• “We are smarter than me. How to Unleash the
Power of Crowds in Your Business” (Barry Libert
& John Spector, 2007)
We launched 3 pilot projects at the University of California, San Francisco
to crowdsource ideas for the best research projects.
Feb 2009 March 2009 July 2009
Target Audience
CTSI Leadership
~35
UCSF Research Community
~7500 people
CTSI Community/Affiliates
~300
Time Period
4 weeks6 weeks 5 months
ARRA: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Ideas for Economic
ARRA Stimulus Funding
Ideas for
CTSI Year 4
Ideas for CTSI Renewal Grant Proposal
What does the tool look like?
The tool provides the substrate to achieve several goals. It supports:
1. community building2. team assembly3. innovation management4. collaborative idea generation5. team work on proposals.
Features (Built off Drupal Content Management System)
Submit ideas
Comment on ideas
Vote (Like or Dislike)
Filter by Idea Topics
Sort Ideas by popularity or commenting
Receive E-mail Notifications for updates on ideas of interest
Revise collaboratively to move idea forward
View Idea Status
An Exemplary Discussion Thread
As part of the process,the tool itself was iteratively improved based on user input.
The solicited ideas focused on
research infrastructure and novel approaches
to improve the translation of basic discoveries into health benefits for the community,
known as clinical & translational research.
Unique Page Views = # of sessions during which the forum was viewed one or more times
Targeted Audience
IdeasSubmitted
CommentsSubmitted
VotesSubmitted
% Comments by Unique Page Views
% Votes by Unique Page
Views
CTSI Year 4 ~35 18 41 31 19% 14%
Economic ARRA Stimulus Funding
~300 27 39 75 8% 15%
CTSI Renewal Grant Proposal
~7500 53 47 65 9% 12%
The Process
Initiative supported and promoted by CTSI leadership ...
CTSI leadership evaluated and triaged submitted ideas, providing continual feedback online and via in-person meetings.
Idea Development and Cross-Pollination among other Virtual Communities
Promising ideas that could not be funded initially were transferred to the subsequent “Open Forum” initiative.
What did our users say?
15
Takeaway
Crowdsourcing tools can help leverage the potential for collaborative generation
of new and better ideas and collaborator finding in academia.
Sharing ideas transparently between otherwise seemingly competitive
proposals was received well.
Highlight focused incentives and senior sponsorship to users
Integrate online with real-world communication opportunities
Future work will aim at reaching broader, more distributed audiences beyond
UCSF and applying the lessons learned to the crowdsourcing of ideas to
address pressing biomedical research questions.
Thanks to the Virtual Home Team at CTSI, University
of California, San Francisco.
• Cynthia Piontkowski, Web Producer
• Kristine Moss, Web Manager
• Brad Bulger, Technical Consultant for Web Application Development
• Leslie Yuan, Director of Web Products