Safecast: Bootstrapping Human Capital to Big Data
But just how much radioactive material had escaped was not clear. A tense time was made worse by sporadic disclosures of fragmented information. Those who had power or cell service, mostly friends and family outside the region, were glued to their television and smartphone screens, but, by definition, no one could see the radiation they feared.
Frustrated by their own desires to know what should have been knowable, three technologists—Sean Bonner, Pieter Franken and Joi Ito—founded non-profit Safecast around a volunteer-centered, open, citizen-science, “crowdmapping” model to monitor radiation levels. With the help of thousands of volunteers, by 2018, Safecast had become not just the “go to” source of information on radiation issues in Japan and elsewhere, but also the vanguard example of citizen science.
Yet as Safecast’s dataset strengthened exponentially, the sustainability of its financial model weakened. The same open, crowd-based model that made the founder’s data collection sustainable was still financially unsustainable. Was there a business model that could sustain the organization financially without undermining their volunteer-based operations, and if so, what would it look like?
Keywords: citizen science; creative commons; Open Data; open architecture; volunteer-based organization; human capital; Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Facility; 311; nuclear; radiation; crowdsourcing; bgeigie; geiger counters; kickstarter; sustainability; sustainable business and innovation; Design; Energy Generation; Social Entrepreneurship; Human Capital; Innovation and Invention; Crisis Management; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Technology; Business Model; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; Japan; North and Central America; Europe;
Citation:
Bernstein, Ethan, and Stephanie Marton. "Safecast: Bootstrapping Human Capital to Big Data." Harvard Business School Case 419-033, October 2018. View Details