allaboutadvocacy.com

Science Advocates

    The web celebrated its 20^th birthday this month. In March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper about Information Management  thereby coining the term  “world wide web.”  In The Economist, a discussion about what the web accomplished over these past 20 years caught my attention since it related to advocacy. According to the article, science has benefitted tremendously from Berners-Lee’s vast web of links and networks.  Amateurs now can be called upon to help scientists solve knotty problems that would take years and decades to complete. These freelance Advocates joined GalaxyZoo where people are helping to classify galaxies into categories. More than 150,000 have joined in and they are now onto GalaxyZoo2.  Another advocate network termed Herbaria@athome reviews and scrutinizes old plant cuttings from British museums to hopefully decipher climate change. Over 35,0000 herbarium specimens have been documented so far. The idea of online advocates banding together to solve scientific problems and social science issues is encouraging.