The Open Knowledge Lab is co-organizing this workshop at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD on May 6-8, 2015, in partnership with Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor studio and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines” aims to culminate and then broaden the conversations from a series of regional meetings and webinars taking place through the auspices of Dartmouth’s 2014 IMLS-funded National Forum in Crowdsourcing for Libraries and Archives: Creating a Crowdsourcing Consortium (CCLA), to help advance a truly cross-disciplinary agenda. The 2 ½ day capstone event will bring together 50 scholars and practitioners from several disciplines, spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, as well as representatives from several funding agencies. Through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, we will focus on the question of how researchers and institutions might best leverage crowdsourcing strategies for increasing public engagement, integrating data into existing collections, and improving knowledge production in a variety of domains. This event is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (HC-229771), Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation...
A curious thing happened after giving my UMD job talk: Dr. Neil Fraistat of MITH struck up a conversation about how public participation compares in citizen science and digital humanities. I was struck by the observation that almost all of the challenges facing a wide variety of instigators–developers, researchers, project leaders, and organizers–were fundamentally the same. Volunteer management is volunteer management, regardless of humanities or sciences context, and the same crowdsourcing techniques were being used across these intellectual silos. So we decided to start a conversation on how we can best engage the public in scholarship and stewardship across our disciplinary boundaries. We partnered up with Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Studio, who was leading an effort for a crowdsourcing consortium in libraries, museums, and archives, and designed an event that would serve as a capstone for her workshop series, drawing from an even broader array of practitioners and traditions. Reflecting the diverse communities each of us represents, we pulled together support from 3 fantastic funders (Institute of Museum & Library Services, National Endowment for Humanities, and Sloan Foundation) to bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds. The workshop will bring 60 guests representing a diverse array of organizations, disciplines, and scholarship have been invited to College Park for an intensive 2.5-day conversation from May 6-8, 2015. We’ll be livestreaming some of the sessions to enable broader participation, tweeting with #crowdconf, and creating a professionally-produced proceedings summarizing the wisdom of experts studying and using crowdsourcing in a wide array of contexts. More details about the workshop are available from CrowdConsortium....
Welcome
The Open Knowledge Lab studies infrastructures supporting open knowledge. We focus on citizen science and open data, which broaden access to scientific knowledge.
The Open Knowledge Lab studies infrastructures supporting open knowledge. We focus on citizen science and open data, which broaden access to scientific knowledge.