The Illusion of Average: An Open Science Approach to Research


Public participation for science or advocacy has an inconsistent history of effectiveness. New tools for crowdsourcing and challenge platforms have unflattering track records, revealing the current limits of technologies to enable the centralization or decentralization of power and influence. Local expertise can be harnessed toward a new reality in which communities provide feedback on their own conditions. When challenges arise, publics equipped with new tools can legitimately participate by studying their circumstances, testing alternatives for improving their communities, and advocating for the actions that best reflect their current values. Further, these strategies can be tailored to local realities to increase the likelihood of successful adoption and implementation. There are many examples of how open innovation is changing conversations with participatory infrastructures:

  • When data are open, more values are supported, and alternatives can be explored.
  • Publics can collect and process data to focus attention on locally relevant problems.
  • Publics are local experts who provide distributed context and situational awareness.
  • Publics ask unique questions that can be locally tested with quantified self, agile science, and small data methods.
  • Crowdsourcing can be a form of advocacy, as demonstrated in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Taken together, these opportunities highlight the shifting role of non-scientists from receiving “answers” to, instead, shaping questions and supporting rigorous, contextualized research that can be fed back into a robust, curated knowledge base.

Featured speakers include Erik Johnston, Associate Professor of Policy Informatics, School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University and Director for the Center for Policy Informatics, Arizona State University; and Darlene Cavalier, Professor of Practice, Arizona State University and Founder, SciStarter and ScienceCheerleader. 

Date:
September 23, 2016
Run time:
1:10:46
Location:
ASU Washington Center
Presented by:
Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes