I’m an avid fan of football, basketball, and to a lesser extent soccer. I played soccer in some capacity from 3rd grade and still play to this day, but don’t follow it all that much on a professional level (except for the World Cup). When I was 14 a friend of mine showed me a basketball mixtape called the And1 Mixtape (and this also spawned my interest in hip-hop) and it blew my mind. Also around that time, the Knicks and the NY Giants were both pretty good teams (the Knicks went to the NBA Finals in 1999 and the Giants went to the Superbowl in 2001) and so I started following professional sports.

Somehow my interest in sports slowly grew to become the obsession it is today, as I follow the Knicks religiously, gobbling up any information online that I can about them. In my last few years of following the NBA blog-o-sphere I’ve noticed a new trend.

Both professional teams and sports fans are starting to embrace advanced statistics and are developing their own systems to analyze and scrutinize player contributions. For professional teams (in every sport, not just basketball), the analysis usually comes from highly paid assistant coaches or third party companies with advanced technology and software. For fans, the analysis is done with hard work, perseverance, and lots of time. But still the fans get it done and I would guess they do it just as well if not better than the technology.

But how much better would the analysis be if the mechanisms were combined in much the same way they are combined for various Citizen Science projects (see the Zooniverse projects for a great example and to get involved)?

There are thousands of hours of professional, college, high school, etc sports footage. No single person should need to sift through all that to break down performances, but yet it happens on a daily basis. Not only that, but fans do it as well! Unfortunately there is no line of communication between sports management and the fans except in a few rare cases, although social media is beginning to change this.

But what if that weren’t the case? What if professional sports franchises developed tools that allowed fans to analyze a game?

Better yet, what if this happened in real-time?

What if, for example, the Knicks could have analyzed game footage by half-time to make adjustments for the second half? What if assistant coaches had access to this data and could implement adjustments during the game?

And what if this new level of fan interaction actually led to increased profits for sports teams (both professional and at the college level)? I’m not going to comment on how that mechanism would work, but I can see multiple ways that would come to fruition.

Not only would that be a major game-changer (pun intended!) for professional sports and potentially other businesses, but it could open new avenues for science as well. Scientists could be encouraged to be more open, share more data, and I can see that this avenue would shift scientific incentive from impact to contribution for one reason: employment opportunity.

What if new jobs from all sorts of fields arise that requires the use of software, techology, and critical thinking? These jobs would need a new breed of scientist, an open-scientist to head and develop citizen science endeavors. Professional corporations and the consumer can work together to build and design products that consumers want to buy, companies want to sell, are environmentally friendly, and in the end bring companies and consumers closer together.

In today’s world, not many people think to favorably upon Wall Street. And I can guarantee that any business would want to change their public image to have a more favorable public opinion. To me consumers see corporations as a vehicle to get products that they need and use, but care very little about the brands these products come from. I’ve read article after article about lack of brand loyalty today versus 20 years ago.

A friend of mine is an MBA student here at UNM and he is interested in companies that produce goods and services that fill needs for consumers and incorporate feedback from these consumers. He believes that this feedback loop can be both beneficial to companies and consumers, and I believe this mindset may revive brand loyalty. We’ve been talking a lot lately about the parallels between his studies and my open notebook science research.

Not only that, we also see a collaboration opportunity between business and open science.

If the current model of science is to prioritize impact and patents, what if this new collaboration can change the mentality? I’ve always viewed the future of science to heavily incorporate open access and data sharing. It’s just been tough to visualize the path to attain that future. Slowly governments are beginning to require open access and scientific agencies are beginning to embrace it. But the tipping point is not here yet.

What if business is the lock and citizen science is the key to an open science future? If businesses incorporate the techniques and policies I propose above, the current reward system of science could shift and deliver the future many of us hope to see.