We worked with on this open collaborative R&D project with the super-talented team at Nominet Trust  including Dan Sutch, Ed Anderton and Kieron Kirkland.

Nominet Trust are the UK's leading social technology funder and he team were keen to explore the potential of applying citizen science to solving persistent social problems using design thinking and networked digital technologies.

Rather than commissioning a report, this exploratory Swarm led with prototyping as a way to understand and demonstrate the potential for new types of social innovation using this approach.

‘Citizen science’ is now an established and growing field, in which scientists invite anyone willing to complete a simple online task to help classify and order their research data.  Millions of people contribute to the discovery of new galaxies, new proteins and accelerating cancer research.

The big question was how could citizen science techniques might be applied to social challenges.

We designed and hosted a 1 day Swarm Live where a diverse gathering of 40 folks descended on Mozilla Hackspace in London. The collective of social researchers, academics, social innovators, designers, developers and citizen science practitioners got to work on a series of 'live' challenges that had emerged prior to the event through an 'open scoping' exercise hosted here.

A summary of the day is here and the story of the day as it happened is here.

“Keep an eye on #citsocsci – an experiment at the borders of community crowdsourcing, citizen science & social innovation”

Dan McQuillan, co-founder of Social Innovation Camp