Humanity has a history of using "distributed labor" to solve problems too large for any one individual. However, in the past these efforts have been limited by the "efficiency" of the best available technology accessible to the public. For example, the contextual definitions found in the Oxford English Dictionary were first assembled in the late 1800s by mailing out "word" postcards to users who would search for contextual use, document their source, and then send the postcard back to the editor. This snail-mail based infrastructure, and the breadth of the enterprise, is one of the reasons it took 49 years for the first copy of OED (initially called the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles) to be published. [1][2]

Our advanced cyberinfrastructure has gone from being in only a few leading academic research labs to being generally accessible to the public. Children now have "game machines" that surpass the computational processing power of supercomputers from the 1980s connected at broadband speeds that are an order of magnitude beyond the initial data network (NSFnet) used for scientific collaboration.

Interestingly as the technology foundation has increased so have our efforts to enlist volunteers in the scientific enterprise. These efforts have moved beyond the realm of simply using their idle computing problems (SETI@Home) to actively involving them in the scientific enterprise. Perhaps one of the more interesting projects in this regards in the Herbaria@home project. Volunteers have used a web based form to transcribe shorthand notation on 12,000 samples in the Manchester Museum into an electronic database. (see attached image for form).[3] Scientific software developers at Berekely have taken the challenge of amateur involvement seriously enough to create the Berekely Open System for Skill Aggregation (Bossa) to provide an infrastructure for distributed cyberinfrastructure based problem solving. [4][5]Hebraria@home: Screen Shot of Web Form for Herbraria

What will the growth of this public infrastructure mean for science?

First, and foremost, the spread of our advanced cyberinfrastructure to the public will increase the number of amateur scientific volunteers who will help gather, analyze, and discuss scientific data. Efforts will range from the continued donation of "spare" computational cycles from personal computing/gaming devices to active involvement in annotating specimens, uploading data from personal sensing devices, and running of experiments. The net positive impact of these efforts will be an increased scientific literacy among what could be called the scientific hobbyist.

Second, the scientific and software development community, will need to develop a variety of tools for validating amateur based observation and analysis. Apart from efforts such as BOSSA we will likely begin to see known scientific rules inoculated into expert algorithms which will identify observations that are aberrant.

Third, it is likely that a subset of scientific hobbyist will find themselves at odds with scientific professionals. This tension between public perception and expert knowledge can already be found online in an examination of anti-immunization web sites which cull selective snippets of data to prove their point. This tension will make it increasingly important for us to have open discourse on scientific topics which are accessible to the lay audience.

[1] The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester, 1998.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary Timeline, Everything2.com, Oxford English Dictionary@Everything2.com
[3]Herbaria@home stats, news and progress
[4] "Spreading the Load", The Economist, December 6, 2007.
[5] Berkeley Open System for Skills Aggregation, see BossaIntro - BOINC - Trac