New technologies such as blockchain accelerate the potential for decentralized data gathering. The wide spread applications, trust, transparency and integrity of this approach have many people around the world very captivated right now.
One exciting possibility of technical approaches that can transparently gather data together from global, eclectic and diverse people is the potential of finding breakthrough innovations in science that are not possible otherwise. Perhaps the biggest breakthroughs in quantum physics, cosmology, astronomy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and new energy technologies are one or more “citizen science” projects away from reality.
This article is a recent discussion of a citizen science project sponsored by NASA and The National Science Foundation:
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-mystery-purple-sky-citizen-scientists.html
The next article is a new division of MIT that hopes to explore and study the exciting potential of collective intelligence: