Help shaping public health, one task at a time: join the ECDC Crowd
Everyone can join and help improve public health: join the ECDC Crowd and work on improving and transforming health science one task at a time with your insights on study design, statistical analysis, data collection and interpretation. For a healthier future for all of us.
Who or what is the ECDC Crowd?
Everyone is welcome to join - even if you are not an infectious disease expert. This crowdsourcing project taps into the collective knowledge of diverse groups with various interests and backgrounds that will form the ‘the Crowd’. The aim is to make scientific production and collaboration easier in the field of public health and infectious diseases and at the same time explore opportunities to combine human input with machine learning.
One area where ECDC hopes to specifically gain from crowdsourcing is literature/scoping and systematic reviews. To do this, crowd members will be involved in so called ‘micro-tasks’ related to the selection of data and information, identification of relevant studies (e.g. observational studies), text annotation, study classification, sorting by topic, and screening of titles and abstracts.
Ready for your first task?
Marking World Tuberculosis Day on 24 March, one of the tasks is to provide support for a scoping review: ECDC is looking for studies, whether there are single studies or systematic reviews or literature reviews, that provide information on the follow-up of patients and/or their contacts through at least two steps of the tuberculosis (TB) care pathway (from testing or screening people and their contacts for TB to completion of treatment).
The ECDC Crowd is open to all. Every crowd task will start with a short training where topic and aim of the task will be explained and where you will be able to test if the task works for you. One aim (and challenge) of developing micro-tasks is to make them easy to understand and follow - and quick, so that every task only takes a few minutes.
What's in it for you?
As a member of the Crowd you will be part of a community supporting public health. Even if you only have 10 minutes per day to contribute, these 10 minutes will count.