Follow-up on turning the pursuit of knowledge into massive, crowd-sourced, online communities

In my presentation last week, I mentioned a CMU computer science professor named Adrien Treuille who presented at SXSW Interactive. He gave a great summary of the benefits of and opportunities within crowd-sourcing scientific pursuits, specifically with his online games FoldIt and EteRNA (300,000 players "incidentally" improving genetic algorithms). As my venture's goal is to crowd-source project ideas with gamification elements, I took the opportunity to capture his key points and to paraphrase his rationale for them.

Others of you might also be interested in similar pursuits, whether in this class or others, so I thought presenting Mr. Treuille's points here might be useful and inspirational to you:

1. "Games make us understand."
   To get people playing games that are also knowledge tools, it's important to help people understand what the science they are playing with actually feels like. Treuille's team also created expert versions of game software for professionals: for example, a pharmaceutical company uses a version to help people who order RNA's from them understand what it is they're ordering. There is something powerful here at the intersection of interactive techniques and hard scientific disciplines: "Call it Interactive Biology." Training, education, and professional perspectives all benefit.
2. "Humans can solve hard problems."
   Humans can do complicated things and see patterns that computers can't. Humans consistently solve protein puzzles that computers don't understand.
3. "Creating crowdsourced science games is a rush!"
   It is "awesome" to see hundreds of thousands of people responding to your games.
4. "Human learning takes place."
   Iterative design occurs when people experiment. Through this process, human players begin to dominate computer players. Again, people see patterns and learn from them.
5. "Humans naturally create knowledge."
   Humans are simply and inherently fascinated.
6. "We are creating new scientists."
   Reward players for writing plain English strategies. What are you doing when looking for new molecules? What's important and what's not? Players post strategies and then the best of these get folded into an Eterna Ensemble Strategy which will be used to improve science. For example, a completely unknown predictor of molecule stability was discovered by a librarian from Ohio. In a group chat, players asked for the experimental protocols necessary to synthesize molecules in their homes (informally called "Backyard Biosynth") because the game's makers weren't synthesizing molecules fast enough to satisfy players' gaming desires.
7. "People can break rules. Computers can't."
   "Players, build challenges for one another." Players created thousands of player-puzzles, like "RNA Alphabet." Treuille's team realized, "Wow, this is a scientific problem in its own right." They had computers compete against humans to solve these puzzles, with players searching for errors in computer solutions. When they find errors, Treuille's team is able to program new algorithms to prevent those problems from happening again. "Crowd-sourcing," Treuille asks? "No. CROWD-SOLVING."
8. "There are a lot of humans."
9. "Humans work for free."
   "Give them a score! That's all it takes," if the game is at all fun. Pure competition will lure players in, says Treuille. "Don't just give them points. Give them LOTS of points." "These games work because we imbued them with science. At first, we tried to take the sciencey parts out. But nobody cared. These fields have a real romance to them. The more science we imbed in these games, the more people wanted to play. In so many ways, these games are deeply, deeply imbued with science. We subtly remind people of the context of science problems, like a blue background with bubbles to remind players that the game is being played in a watery environment."
10. "Crowdsourcing science means a lot to players."

For more, I found a video of Treuille's presentation here:

http://www.crowdsourcing.org/video/adrien-treuille-crowdsourcing-science-/8454

Amazing stuff! And some great insights into how to build a user community around knowledge aggregation.