Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big
  Data: Galaxy Zoo
  The knowledge commons research framework is applied to a case of commons
governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a
leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the
first place Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer
non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis
via the Internet. In the second place Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example
of peer production, sometimes known colloquially as crowdsourcing, by which
data are gathered, supplied, and/or analyzed by very large numbers of anonymous
and pseudonymous contributors to an enterprise that is centrally coordinated or
managed. In the third place Galaxy Zoo is a highly visible example of
data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science,
by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive
volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging
technologies. This chapter synthesizes these three perspectives on Galaxy Zoo
via the knowledge commons framework.
