Open Research Platform

New Forms of Observation and Experimentation

A key facet of the Law Lab’s work is the development of tools for crowdsourcing our own research data collection and experiments. Building on the success of "citizen science" initiatives such as the NASA Clickworkers Project and the Galaxy Zoo, our objective is to distribute social and behavioral science research tasks that would have previously required the investment of immense amounts of time and money by trained experts. By shifting these modular tasks to a much wider pool of collaborators and participants, we will not only enhance efficiency, but will also be able to focus the efforts of highly skilled personnel on the most complex work. Consistent with our mission to build collaborative networks and open technologies at the Law Lab, we aim to make prototypes of the technologies and analytical techniques available for re-use and improvement by the "crowd."

Collaborating: The Cooperation Project

The Berkman Center's Cooperation project is an interdisciplinary community of researchers, projects, and practitioners engaged in studying the underlying factors that contribute to human cooperation. We aim to encourage dialogue and serve as a meeting point for work occurring on cooperation in variety of fields including sociology, behavioral economics, simulation, evolutionary theory, law, Internet studies, business and innovation research, and psychology. Through the study of online cooperation, our goal is to examine an expansive swath of cases and develop a deeper understanding of the varieties of communities and cooperation. This will enable us to develop and test a set of cooperative systems design “levers” that can inform future attempts to foster online cooperation. The insights from our research will also be relevant to studying cooperation in offline groups and organizations.