The hairball is jargon for data scientists. It means a special graphic that illustrates intersections.
When I visited the Citizen Science Association’s first conference in San Jose, Calif., in February, it felt like a living hairball. Every one of the 600 people was already a networker, an accelerator, or somehow a person forced by curiosity to ask other people to help assemble science answers.
There were birders (Loon counters from Maine), microbiologists, physicists and policy wonks. If some of you don’t know the delicious explosion of citizen science, please detour now to read about games of proteins, games of neuron-mapping, games of whale song matching and thousands of other projects here.
But like catching lightning bugs and magic in a bottle, there were people who thought the very labeling and defining of citizen science might break its tender wings. This first-ever conference tried to find the most common ground between projects and hoped that sharing best practices (and sharing conference rooms) would save some people time and trouble finding the right methods.
I don’t have answers for any of the wonderfully provocative questions I heard in San Jose. But I came home from #citsci2015 (as tagged on Twitter) newly impressed with the collective power of citizens. My own panel about microbiology included two projects where I donated samples: The Wild Life of Our Homes and Ubiome.
Our panel included California high-school science teacher, Bethany Dixon, DIY biology volunteer Patrik d’Haeseleer, David Coil and Jenna Lang, both of the Eisen Lab at the University of California at Davis, Adam Robbins-Pianka of American Gut and Holly Menninger of Your Wild Life at North Carolina State University.  Collectively, we bonded most over what  is not known about microbial ecosystems rather than what is known.
Studying the ecosystems that microbes create has been compared to discovering a new Amazon rain forest. It is tantalizing to find out that obese people and diabetic people have different microbes in their guts, but we are far from understanding why. The microbiomes of individual houses differ, as my panel member Menninger is studying, but we may be years from understanding how and why. We were a panel of people at peace with puzzling complexity.
Imagine every one of the thousands of different microscopic creatures living in your gut playing an unknown and changing role in your life and your health. That’s quite a hairball, and untangling it will take years. I’m very glad to have met the people at #citsci2015 as passengers with me on this journey.
If you are pursuing citizen science in some way, please let me know. I will continue writing about it here.