Institute For The Future

iPhone and citizen science

Alexis Madrigal throws a link to the X2 Project in his post on the addition of GPS in the iPhone:

 

With Steve Jobs' announcement that the iPhone 3G will have geolocation built-in, plenty of people are excited about finding good restaurants near them or worried about the privacy implications....

But the new capability could be adapted by a different, unexpected crowd: citizen scientists taking the real-time environmental pulse of cities and suburb.

One requirement of this data-gathering effort would be maintaining the integrity of the data input. GPS eliminates the need to accurately report location data, which is a major area of human error. With Apple putting devices with these capabilities into the hands of more and more consumers, scientists could discover a huge untapped data-gathering resource if they can churn out cheap sensors that can communicate with the iPhone.

 

One of the slightly unexpected things about X2 has been the amount of activity around amateur science (or citizen science, or pro-am science-- the phenomenon has several names). One of the more popular project groups is about amateur science; our elite corps of science forecasters foresee the growth of infrastructures for amateur science, the expansion of cyberinfrastructures using (or drawing on) amateurs, broadening amateur participation in science, the return of the wealthy amateur scientist (last seen in Jules Verne novels), and the rise of science-saturated local activism. So Madrigal's argument makes perfect sense.