From May 6-8, 2015, MITH teamed up with Dartmouth College and the iSchool at University of Maryland to host a workshop entitled Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing across the Disciplines (CrowdCon).  The goal of the workshop was to expand the ongoing conversations about best practices for engaging the public across both the humanities and the sciences, in order to build a networking bridge for crowdsourced research projects and to build a consortium to support such work.

Much attention has recently been given to ​“crowdsourced,” or “citizen science/citizen humanists” projects, which have developed across numerous fields, including the sciences, government, and education, both for knowledge generation and for increasing the level of engagement between online resources and the public. Crowdsourced projects now increasingly draw the attention of funders who recognize the value of these methodologies for public engagement and the generation of new knowledge.

Over three days, CrowdCon discussed standards for evaluating and incorporating user-generated contributions and directions for the implementation of crowdsourcing efforts; established a national consortium among groups involved with these projects; and provided a means for funders to understand the opportunities and challenges for crowdsourcing.

This event was organized by Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College), Neil Fraistat (MITH, University of Maryland), and Andrea Wiggins (iSchool, University of Maryland). CrowdCon was sponsored by The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Sloan Foundation..

MITH Winnemore Fellow Amanda Visconti provided thorough social media coverage of the event using the hashtag #CrowdCon via Twitter. See below for a collection of Storified tweets of the event along with select videos from various sessions. This is the first of a two-part series of posts documenting the event. Stay tuned for more videos and Stories next week!

  1. Keynote by Mary Flanagan (Wednesday May 6, 2015)
  2. “Signals” for current & future research crowdsourcing concerns
  3. “Dispatches from the Field” panel (Thursday May 7, 2015)
  4. Funding, Example Projects, & Resources/Reading
  5. Photos of Research Crowdsourcing Brainstorming and Presentations