Hi! I'm Liam, and I'm the lead engineer behind the citizen science protocol "Star Sailors". I've decided to start writing development logs again so our new players and partners can stay up to date with what's going on - and hopefully I can bring a few new users in along the way.
The last post I wrote about Star Sailors was way back in the middle of the Buildspace S5 Incubator...here's a link if anybody wants to check that out. We've come a long way since then, with over 400 commits, around 1 million lines of code changed...and plenty of other meaningless stats.
I'm going to do my best to keep this post relatively short, but I'll be aiming to provide updates every week and will provide more comprehensive documentation on our development website.
What is Star Sailors?
Star Sailors is a full stack application that allows anyone, regardless of education level or occupation, to participate in citizen science research projects, by either classifying data from research projects, or providing data from the real world.
What is citizen science?
Citizen science is a term used to describe projects that members of the public can participate in. You don't need to be a "real scientist" or working in a specific field to participate and help out.
Citizen science projects often involve providing participants with large datasets (usually images) and asking users to describe and annotate what they see. This can be useful for projects across a wide range of fields, like Astronomy (for example, Exoplanet Hunting) and Meteorology (Cloudspotting), and is incredibly accessible - all you need is an internet-connected device.
Some projects may involve users going out into the real world and looking for data that researchers have requested. This can be useful for conservation projects, where researchers are provided with sightings of rare birds and their locations (as an example), helping to track their migrationary behaviour. These projects aren't always accessible to everyone, however, as they often rely on participants being in a particular location.
Why Star Sailors?
There are a few websites where you can contribute to citizen science projects already - the most famous is Zooniverse. Some of these websites have hundreds of thousands of users - and dozens of completed, successful projects. So a reasonable question might be - "why bother making yet another citizen science website"?
These platforms are amazing, and I've spent plenty of time on SciStarter and Zooniverse, so it's not because I feel that these platforms are bad. However, my issue with these existing platforms is they're very static, in terms of narrative & environment. If you discover a planet in "Planet Hunters" project, you can't then watch it collide with an asteroid you discover. You can't populate it with alien messages you find in SETI's "Are we alone" project.
In short, there is no gamification and no link between projects. And I feel that this affects the ability for these other platforms and websites to attract more casual users, and to expand their data collection abilities.
The idea for Star Sailors (at least, for the near future) isn't to create some interactive, open-3d world to explore and build and compete. It's just going to be a shared map, with a lot of data, where you can jump on for 20 minutes when you're on the train, or walking outside and see a bird that interests you.
The goal is simple - Star Sailors is a world composed of data from various citizen science projects, and the narrative and events that occur in this world are shaped and driven by you - our users.
What's next?
We're heavily focused on user growth, so we're working on a few key elements:
- Adding more projects & more content - primarily across the astronomy & geology sectors
- Increasing incentives for users to invite their friends
- Improving the tutorial & onboarding experience
On the technical side, we're working with our partners to improve the process of sending our users' classifications & discoveries back to researchers so that they can benefit quickly from Star Sailors.
If this is something that interests you, check us out at https://starsailors.space
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