On 4 December, the Nominet Trust recognised Crowdcrafting as one of the most inspiring hi-tech social innovations of 2014 and “the world’s most diverse open source software platform for ‘citizen science’ projects”.
Crowdcrafting is an open source service run by Madrid-based company Scifabric that allows anyone to set-up up their own online research project. Research data can be inexpensively crowdsourced to large networks of volunteers who are asked to complete specific tasks to help analyse it. Such tasks usually can not be completed by computers.
Nominet is one the world’s leading internet registry companies and guardians of the .uk domain space. The Nominet Trust focuses on funding internet based projects that have a positive impact on the lives of individuals and communities, especially those most vulnerable or disadvantaged. Each year the Trust identifies one hundred examples of the world’s most inspiring social innovations, where digital technologies have been used to to tackle a significant social change.
The 2014 Nominet Trust 100 was selected by a committee of prominent digital and social entrepreneurs from around the world, which included Tom Hulme (Google), Simon Devonshire (Wayra) and Caroline Daniel (Financial Times).
The committee was particularly impressed by projects hosted on Crowdcrafting such as FrackFinder, whose volunteers took just over a month to classify thousands of aerial images of Pennsylvania to build an accurate map of fracking activity in the state, and the Digital Humanitarian Network, that helped to analyse tweets in the aftermath of Typhoon Pablo (Philippines, 2012) in order to efficiently bring aid to those worst affected.
More information
http://socialtech.org.uk/nominet-trust-100/