8/22/2019 Crowdsourcing-and-Open-Source

1/2

Crowdsourcing and open source: knowledge is a giftWe are living in the "age of generosity", says Brian Eno.

Never before has so much information been given away by so many from software and

videos, to their own PCs, says Roger Highfield.

It might not feel like it, but we are living in a golden age for generosity. That, at least, was the

contention of the musician Brian Eno, when I heard him speak this month at the cole Polytechnique

Fdrale de Lausanne.

The occasion was the annual presentation of the Rolex Awards for philanthropy, given this year to

remarkable individuals under 30 who are dedicated to improving life on the planet. Yet when Eno

talked about an "age of generosity", he was not just referring to such traditional forms of do-gooding.

He also meant the extraordinary generosity we show when it comes to the dissemination ofknowledge part of a remarkable trend made possible by the internet and the rise of

"crowdsourcing".

Knowledge was once closely guarded, on the principle that "scientia potentia est" "knowledge is

power". Yet as Eno pointed out, giving your knowledge away is one of the best things you can do to

enhance your reputation. He described how Salman Khan, an alumnus of MIT and Harvard

Business School, discovered that he had an aptitude for explaining arcane subjects after a cousin in

Dubai asked for his help. Since he gave up his job, his not-for-profit Khan Academy has produced

hundreds of online videos for students worldwide, including Eno.

Khan is one example of a trend that includes the open source movement, which has given the world

free software such as Linux, and open innovation, where many people from different disciplines can

tackle the same problem simultaneously through a site called Innocentive. Indeed, as the scientific

community is discovering, there is an army of amateurs out there, willing to donate their time and

knowledge.

There's nothing new in this, of course. Enthusiastic amateurs have recorded birds, tagged butterflies,measured sunlight, spotted new supernovae, counted sunspots. photographed meteor trails,

discovered comets, invented instruments and much more. But what is breathtaking is the scale of

what is now possible. Simply by donating their PCs' spare capacity, users can join an armada of

home computers, which expert software welds together into a virtual machine that can easily

outperform a supercomputer.

8/22/2019 Crowdsourcing-and-Open-Source

2/2

This "distributed computing" is especially helpful when it comes to trawling through the tidal wave of

data generated by modern science. The trend took off with the launch ofSETI@homein 1999, which

runs a free program that downloads and analyses data from a radio telescope in Puerto Rico,

searching for evidence of alien signals.

Many more projects have followed to classify galaxies, study the Moon and Sun, evaluate protein

structures and more. Even The Daily Telegraph joined in: five years ago, we explored a vast range

of climate-change scenarios using a site called ClimatePrediction(www.climateprediction.net)This

enabled tens of thousands of PC users around the world to download a special screensaver that ran

a Met Office computer model. The verdict of the experiment, based on 100,000 participants and

published in the journal Nature, suggested that a doubling of greenhouse gas levels from their pre-

industrial state could cause more than double the maximum temperature rise that the Inter-

Governmental Panel on Climate Change then considered likely.

ClimatePrediction is still going, although it now focuses more on weather than climate and

elsewhere, too, the march of citizen science continues apace. Last month saw the launch of

OldWeather (www.oldweather.org),which aims to record the weather information in handwritten

Royal Navy logbooks from the First World War, to help build a more accurate picture of how our

climate has changed over the last century.

And sitting before Eno in Lausanne was an award winner, J acob Colker. He helped set up The

Extraordinaries, a two-year-old social enterprise based in San Francisco. It has created awebsite, www.sparked.com,through which volunteers can offer their professional skills to help good

causes they care about, from designing a logo to advising on the best place to sink a water well in

Kenya. So far, more than 100,000 people have got involved, in a phenomenon Colker calls "micro-

volunteering". How's that for an age of generosity?