Call It Crowdsourced Science

Sandra Porter has a couple of posts at Discovering Biology in a Digital World about the concept of citizen science, which she says "is making it possible for people to participate and monitor the health of their communities." Having regular people feel more connected to science could have a lot of community benefit, she adds. "I'm sure we'd have fewer people believing silly things on Fox news if they were doing experiments and looking at the world outside instead of listening to ideological nonsense on TV." She also encourages organizations like the Joint Genome Institute to encourage community participation in its larger programs to help get more people involved and to get to the end goal faster.