UK Citizen Rainfall Network : a pilot study

Crowd sourcing as a potential method to collect large amounts of data in a relatively inexpensive manner while also educating the general public, has received much press recently in both the scientific and public domain. It was first defined by Jeff Howe (Brabham, 2008, and references therein) as the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call and, although this method has been used to great effect in a number of profitable cases by a variety of industries, its vast potential for scientific research has also recently begun to be exploited. From a scientific perspective, crowd-sourcing projects are often referred to as citizen science, which is defined by Wiggins and Crowston (2011) as a form of research collaboration involving members of the public in scientific research projects to address real-world problems.