Citizen Cyberscience Summit

Galaxy Zoo and the whole Zooniverse will be well represented at the upcoming Citizen Cyberscience Summit. This event, held at King’s College London on 2-3 September 2010, has been organised in order to showcase recent examples of online citizen science and provide a forum for discussing the impact, potential and future directions of such projects.

In the Thursday afternoon session Steven Bamford, astrophysicist and Zooniverse science director, will deliver a talk giving a brief overview of Galaxy Zoo, the wealth of science that it is generating, and the development of the Zooniverse. Following that there will be a panel session featuring two long-term Zooites, Jules and Hanny, which will discuss why people volunteer their time for science projects, what they learn from it, and how social networking helps science. Finally, on Friday morning, Philip Brohan from the UK Met Office will give a sneak preview of a new Zooniverse project that we are currently developing. There are lots of other interesting speakers too, see the programme for details.

The point of this summit is promote discussion between everyone currently involved, or who would benefit from getting involved, in citizen science. That includes scientists, educators, and most importantly you: the participants, without whom citizen science wouldn’t exist. If you’re interested in coming along, hearing about the latest developments and joining in the discussion, then you can get tickets here (but hurry, they are going fast).

We look forward to seeing some of you there!

Oxford Meetup, August 20th

There have been several new starters at the Zooniverse in the past few months. Myself and Stuart were remarking the other day that we have still not met the Zooites in person. Although we have come to know several of you via email, we thought it was time to rectify the situation.

PUB

We have organised a Zooniverse meetup, two weeks today, on Friday August 20th. We’re meeting at 5pm at a pub in Oxford called ‘Far From the Madding Crowd‘. There is already a forum thread on the topic, started by Alice.

We’d like to invite everyone to come along and join us! Most of the Oxford team will be there as well as members of the Chicago team, who are visiting Zooniverse HQ that week. We’ll give a short talk about the state of the Zooniverse and after that we’ll generally just be mingling, chatting and getting to know you all.

We hope that many of you can make it. The location is near to both the train and bus stations, as well as to several B&Bs. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here in the comments or on the forum thread.

We hope to see you in a couple of weeks.