Following an unprecedented election that left Americans divided and displaced, the media in battle over facts with the Trump administration, and the security of every individual uncertain and threatened, we are now witnessing an explosion of organizations and startups focused on uniting people and leveraging the power of collaboration to collect data and build technology to secure our freedom and future.
Fears of government defunding data collection, manipulating data sets and mis-communicating politically inconvenient research have inspired the founding of organizations like Data Refuge, a distributed, grassroots effort around the United States in which scientists, researchers, hackers, students, librarians and other volunteers are collecting government data to preserve it and keep it publicly accessible. Their focus on climate and environmental data is in defense of the White House removing climate data from the EPA website and screening scientific research. Others, like Open Context are helping preserve, annotate and share archeology data.
Find out what other government data is being removed from the Internet at Sunlight Foundation, where they are actively tracking the removal or changes to data sets.
Collaborative research platforms will emerge in every industry to not only aggregate and maintain integrity of data sets but also enable individuals to accelerate the development of solutions independent of government funding and policies.
This is Wikipedia on steroids and much more. Data.world is a social network exclusively for people who want to find and collaborate on building data sets. Similarly, ResearchGate provides a professional network for the scientific community to connect, collaborate, share results and drive progress. Already, more than 11 million scientists and researchers use it and are uploading more than 2.5 million publications each month.
Beyond the civic tech and education categories, this same model of empowering individuals to organize and work together to problem solve has also been successful in transportation with Waze, financial investing with Numerai, app development with GitHub, data science with Dataiku, startup solutions with ProductHunt, and many more.
Success of these platforms have initially been driven by users who are mission-driven, motivated by gamification/monetary rewards, or seeking to build an online portfolio. These platforms crossed over the chasm from passing curiosity to active and productive engagement, enabling them to truly provide more value with each user and establish a sustainable data network to help them accelerate solutions. And as these platforms grow, they will become future leaders in their industries and many will redefine our workforce.
Tiffany Stone 