Crowdsourcing Science:Public Participate In Innovation In The Context Of Networked Communication

Crowdsourcing science is a social collaboration model for public participated in scientific research. It indicats that based on the Internet and digital media, scientific research organizations cross their boundaries and open themselves to the public. Not only can it effectively manage the research organizations, but also can efficiently utilizing public wisdom to accomplish the scientific researches and innovation activities. Based on a long-term focus on this model, this dissertation starts from the perspective of the leaders and participants, applies multiple qualitative and quantitative research approaches, such as netnography, literature research, normative research, and empirical research. From the core concept of crowdsourcing science, this dissertation studies on the typical model of this public participating in innovation trends, the activity mechanism, and laws related.Scientific innovation is on the brink of change and public participation is the latest trend. Scientific research organizations have already accumulated experiences of remote collaboration, virtual joint innovation in implementation of their macro-sized science projects. However, those experiences are limited within the scientific research community, have not made a breakthrough impact on the establishment of scientific research organizations. Crowdsourcing science is an open cooperation among scientific research organizations and widely unknown Internet users. Since there is no contract between each party and the implementation is in extremely flexible format, it opens up a new way to access to innovation resources. This process takes place under the context of networked communication. Thus, the Internet technical characteristics and communication models branded a deep imprint on it. Including contact and cooperation of various groups, multidimensional communication encouraged by networked media, innovative thinking enabled by technical progresses and so on, there are quite different features in organizational form and operation mechanism in crowdsourcing science compared with traditional research organizations. In order to fully grasp the crowdsourcing of scientific activity patterns, this dissertation presents an innovative multi-dimensional analytical framework, to explore the organizational form, scientific production and communication, as well as current and future trends of crowdsourcing science. The outcome of this study may fill the research gaps in this topic, and also provides reference for the research and innovation practices and policy making.This dissertation proposes the concept of crowdsourcing including four elements, which are crowdsourcer, crowdsourcing task, public and crowdsourcing process, defined its connotation and denotation, clear the "crowdsourcing science" as a technical term. Expanded from meso level, it established the organizational typology framework, emphasized that virtual organization is the way crowdsourcing science collected and managed upon. Crowdsourcing science has two main aspects, which are1) scientific production and2) scientific communication. Using a variety of theories in the context of networked communication, this dissertation explains the organizational structure as well as process designing and management characteristics, enriches and developes crowdsourcing and virtual organization studies. By combining theoretical and empirical research on the current state, it analyzes and forecastes the future of crowdsourcing science. This research used multiple methods to collect abundant and precious first-hand information on the cases, explores crowdsourcing science’s developments and the impact factors, especially the constraints, summarizes some of the notable features, in order to bring benefits for of break through the bottleneck, speed up the process of practice.The main conclusions of this dissertation are:Crowdsourcing science promoted the innovation of scientific production. Crowdsourcing science has changed the traditional model of scientific research. It means that through the Internet, we can create a cohesive virtual research organization for scientific research and enable public working together with scientists. Through the intermediary role of crowdsourcing science organizations, research organizations could establish contact with the public with heterogeneous knowledge, making research and innovation within the organization to become low-cost, low-risk and more creative. Crowdsourcing science ignites the passion of the public participation. The success of it is the broad participation of the public. It is based on real scientific research experience; enrich the connotation of science communication in participation. Crowdsourcing science inspires the collective wisdom of the public. It relies on the communication and cooperation mechanism to perform their individual capacities, formes virtual teams and groups to show their innovation energy, eventually express their collective wisdom. Meanwhile, based on the complexity of the task and solutions style, organizations would design different levels of decision-making mechanisms to refine the collective wisdom of the public and extraction. Crowdsourcing science remodels scientific paradigm. Scientific research has to develop in its own way with integrating worldwide experiences. Networked communication sparks the transformation of scientific research and scientific communication. Not only does it improved the communication style between public and scientists, but also alteres the behavior of scientific research. More importantly, it changes the relationship between scientists and the public using media.