Beyond the Lab: Designing Crowd Science for Research
What if your next breakthrough came from thousands of minds working alongside yours?
Science doesn’t happen in isolation. It emerges from the collective intelligence of researchers, citizens, and communities working together. Yet many researchers remain confined to their labs, missing opportunities to engage broader communities in meaningful ways.
Join Professors Marion K. Poetz and Henry Sauermann – authors of How and When to Involve Crowds in Scientific Research – for a hands-on workshop introducing key concepts and tools for designing and leading crowd science projects. Working in small groups with proven frameworks, you’ll learn to identify opportunities for crowd involvement, think about the role of AI, and sketch early project ideas. Real-world cases from fields such as biodiversity, medicine, physics, and the social sciences will illustrate the possibilities of crowd science. They will also help discuss questions and challenges that arise when engaging diverse crowds.
This session is designed for researchers from any discipline who are new to crowd science, are planning their first project, or want to expand their existing knowledge. No prior experience is required – just curiosity, questions, and perhaps a research idea you’d like to explore “beyond the lab.”
Additional resources, including the open-source book, are available at www.sciencewithcrowds.org.
