What is Signtific?
The Signtific Project is designed to engage the global scientific community in anticipating the most important innovations and disruptions in science and technology—and understanding their implications for the future of science and of society at large. It stands at the leading edge of several trends that will reshape the practice of science over the next few decades:
• It uses an open-source approach to identify and aggregate signals of
potential scientific innovations and disruptions.
• It leverages new social media to engage both professional and citizen
scientists at new scales.
• It uses gaming principles to explore alternative incentive structures for
collaboration and knowledge sharing among scientists.
• It targets specific geographic and ethnographic niches that are likely to
become leaders in emerging disciplines.
In these ways, Signtific is both a platform for understanding the changing face of science and an experiment in creating this change. This report summarizes the accomplishments of the project in the past year, with a special focus on Signtific Lab: a platform that builds on the principles of gaming to engage scientists and the lay public in thought experiments about leading-edge developments.
