How Does Participatory Exploration Scale?
At NASA Ames, we live in Silicon Valley and are exposed to a rather atypical set of 20- and 30-somethings who spend their weekends at things like SuperHappyDevHouse, and cupcakecamps full of the who’s who of web 2.0. It’s easy to think sometimes that if we could just make all NASA’s mission data available in some kind of magical XML, the entire world would rush to make innovative products from it.
While there is a substantive demand and use-case for this data by scientists, academics, and geeks the world around, overall we’re talking about a small subset of the population. This brings up (at least) two questions:
- How do we generalize what we mean by participatory exploration beyond independently motivated technophiles, and
- How can we design projects that actually scale gracefully with massive participation?
I’ve heard public participation callously referred to as ‘free labour’, but the truth is that increased participation is often correlated with additional overhead to manage those contributions. Management tasks scale with volume, precisely because the vast majority of contributors are non-experts (by design). The NASA CoLab team had numerous discussions with NASA projects who loved the idea of public participation, but felt they didn’t have the bandwidth to support it.
Certain participatory projects have models which do not require this kind of oversight. What are some of their characteristics?
- Projects where participants with different levels of expertise can teach/learn from each other independent of mission scientists.
- Projects where the output has no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer (could be art, but not necessarily).
- Similarly, projects where the application is more general than the realm of space science (for example, image processing, machine vision, or compression algorithms), and participants can engage on the level of their own fields of expertise without a bottleneck inside NASA.
- Development of technology products like mobile phone applications, screensavers, atlases, and virtual worlds.
- ‘Remixing’ NASA content in music, documentaries, or visual art.
Most of these ideas are still not general-audience. In fact, we might inevitably find that the most general participatory projects are one step removed from NASA. Perhaps it is the products people make with low level NASA data and documents, that have the most potential to engage broader audiences.
Ironically, most of these come back to data accessibility. Open, standard formats, policies which default to higher levels of openness than they currently do, and increased timeliness of release will. These will all play a crucial roles in seeing scalable participatory exploration become a reality.
What are some of your thoughts on general audience, scalable participatory exploration projects?
5 Responses to “How Does Participatory Exploration Scale?”
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Justin Kugler on December 8th, 2008
SETI@Home and Stanford’s Folding@Home I think have really set a standard for general audience, participatory projects.
Perhaps NASA could set up something on the PlayStation Network and/or the Internet where people can download a program that does number crunching for NASA projects that need intense data processing. In return, the users could get high-res exploration images, concept art, or even maybe perks in the upcoming NASA MMO.
ahoppin on December 8th, 2008
1) Automation:
Staff behind the project never have to interact with its participants en masse. Not just the relatively “passive” participatory experience of SETI@Home, but also the quite active and yet automated, algorithm driven process of a DIGG (http://www.digg.com).
2) Group Competition:
Provide templates for structured work by smaller groups, but break “massive scale” into discrete manageable groups, each with the same structure and process for their work, and with metrics for competing amongst the groups; the most successful groups get attention from the staff behind the project, get the rewards of success, etc.; X-Prizes and online fantasy sports leagues are two analogs.
3) Community Process / Peer-to-Peer:
The entity behind the project provides the environment for interaction amongst participants but doesn’t need to participate actively itself, and can harvest data from the results of the peer to peer interaction. Yahoo! Answers might be an analog, or NASA CoLab in Second Life– which certainly takes some staff work but also self-manages as a community to a large degree, so that there is a low ratio of staff time spent relative to participation by participants with one another.
As an aside, IMO we shouldn’t measure “scale” only in terms of the number of participants, but also the depth and quality of that participation. I’d most like to see participatory projects that achieve large scale on both axes– depth/quality/duration/frequency, and also raw numbers of participants.
Stephen Scotti on December 8th, 2008
Perhaps an intermediate level (i.e., above the general public audience) with some face-to-face technical organization and capability is needed for the useful technical contributions, especially in the area of design. An example could be university design classes/projects where design teams could contribute to a NASA problem, but where there is a class instructor or other mentor(s) that can help. This approach may act as a filter that keeps totally useless or impractical ideas from adding to the overhead of a NASA project management or technical team, and it would also help develop skills needed for operating in a team environment. The danger of course is that it may filter out some good ideas too. The frequency and format of interactions between NASA and the teams would need to be determined by trial and error, but the overall process could evolve into a totally a new paradigm for design efforts.
Garth Henning on December 9th, 2008
Any ideas for human spaceflight? While some of the data ideas may apply well to space station microgravity research, but what about the rest of the experience? What is participation beyond just IT stuff? What does it mean to be a participating part of the human spaceflight experience?
And then could you (since I’m looking for crowd-sourced help here myself) provide specific ideas for what participation might mean for an operational launch vehicle, a launch vehicle in development, and an operational on-orbit laboratory? I think participation will mean different things for each of those different programs within human spaceflight.
Peter Robinson on December 21st, 2008
Don’t you think 40-something, 50-something and olders are also on their laptops creating the future? The computing table set for Gen-Y was done by GenX,W,and V. I’d like to see alot more cross-generation talk.
A thought problem I gave to Robbie 6 months. Say NASA said it would turn NASA over to GenY today. What is your plan? You don’t have the knowledge base to do it.
It may by true that new information collaboration technologies provide new methods to interact without bureaucracy, but they themselves are content free. Until GenY puts together a plan which calls for the orderly organization of the spacecraft knowledge in the heads of GenY,X,W,V – it will continue to receive the criticism it has encountered (see NASA watch).
A GenXer willing to help.