Passion as a sustainable source of hard work

December 2007 I wrote about the early successes of Galaxy Zoo (read the Pro-Am revolution reached astronomy). Ever since I have been subscribed to their newsletter to be kept up to date on the great stuff they are doing there.  The story so far has been thrilling.

The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

Many projects are now underway using this data; you can read about the first few in our list of papers published and in progress, on the Galaxy Zoo blog and below. We’ve been successful in getting time on professional telescopes to follow up many Galaxy Zoo discoveries, too; the list currently includes the Isaac Newton and William Herschel Telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canaries, Gemini South in Chile, the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, the IRAM radio telescope in Spain’s Sierra Nevada, the Swift and GALEX satellites, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
…
One of the most exciting discoveries from the original Galaxy Zoo was something we never expected. Hanny Van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher and Galaxy Zoo volunteer, posted an image to the Galaxy Zoo forum and asked “What’s the blue stuff below?” No one knew. The object became known as the “Voorwerp” — Dutch for “object”. To date nobody knows what the “voorwerp” is. The mystery deepens!

This form of crowdsourcing delivers productivity that would otherwise not be possible. Also the serendipitous outcomes would never have been reached. What strikes me is the growing community and its traction. By showing early successes more budget and cool data can be used which feeds the passion of the community. It’s an upward spiral! Crowdsourcing proofs to be sustainable at Galaxy Zoo. Organizations could learn a lot about the way the crowd is engaged.