A Novel Framework Fostering Citizen Science with Blockchain-Based Decentralized Autonomous Communities

Abstract

Citizen Science involves the engagement of public in scientific research to augment and disseminate scientific knowledge. This nurtures the practice of sharing and contributing to data gathering and monitoring activities with the participation of scientific communities and general public. It incorporates idea generation through community formation and invites scientists for leadership, guidance and coordination. Existing citizen science programs are centralized; however, such endeavors may be supported through decentralized autonomous communities realized through blockchains and smart contracts adding transparency and security to the projects. Blockchain is a shared immutable distributed ledger technology that addresses double spending and Byzantine General’s Problem and enables peer to peer digital payments in absence of intermediaries. It has several applications beyond financial sector or cryptocurrencies and one such utility is the smart contract that entails a piece of script that will be automatically executed if certain conditions are fulfilled, in other words, it is a self-executing digital contract. In this paper, we propose a novel colored blockchain technique to develop decentralized autonomous communities leveraging which citizen science can be perceived in a decentralized context. We present the details of the framework that uses such colored blockchain technology to implement decentralized citizen science concept. We also propose an alternate decentralized application leveraging smart contract to implement decentralized citizen science concept.