Pieter Franken, co-creator of Safecast, the world’s most successful citizen science project says trust is essential to ensure there is no bias.
Pieter was on the front lines of the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the earthquake and tsunami. This event was the beginning of the creation of Safecast, now considered one of the world’s most effective citizen science initiatives.
People measured the degree of radiation for people in the area….They created kind of a bias-free network of measurements, where people selected themselves where they wanted to measure.
That was actually what gave us the power. And once you have that, then people can build trust in that data set because if it’s biased, the trust is gone and people will say, “No, but you only measured areas with high radiation,” and blah blah, blah, and vice versa. “You’re greenwashing here and you’re measuring only what is happy and fine.” We didn’t do that. We absolutely left it to our participants to decide where they’re going, zero moderation whatsoever. And that allowed the data set to be very reliable and trusted. And I think that is kind of an element in citizen science that depending on what you do is very important to make sure that the way you organize it doesn’t allow bias to drive the end result.
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