While citizen science projects, crowdsourcing, and other forms of mass collaboration on the Web hold the promise to contribute significantly to scientific research, they often lack adequate institutional or systemic controls to properly mitigate data privacy, cybersecurity, legal, and financial risks. Without such controls in place, government entities or other large institutions are often barred from collaborating with citizen science initiatives, limiting their usefulness and impact. This grant supports efforts by the Commons Lab at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to help reduce these barriers by identifying, assessing and prioritizing the risks associated with mass collaboration projects and developing standards, policies, best practices, and other resources that both government agencies and citizen entrepreneurs can use to work together more effectively. Over the next two years, the Wilson Center will publish two peer-reviewed journal articles on privacy, human subjects, and intellectual property issues; host a roundtable series on cybersecurity; construct an inventory of U.S. government involvement in mass collaboration projects; hold a policy briefing for government agencies; and analyze governance models for mass collaboration projects.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for its Project on Energy and National Security, a research initiative that focuses on increasing our understanding of issues at the intersection of energy, economics, and international security. Led by CFR’s Michael Levi, the project will examine a diverse array of issues, including how national oil companies make investment and production decisions, how infrastructure constraints cause divergence in regional oil prices, the economic and security implications of a significant drop in global oil prices, the consequences of the shifting trade in liquid fuels, and evaluating the effectiveness and consequences of international sanctions against petro-states. Additional grant funds support an annual workshop to discuss ongoing projects and findings, and outreach activities to engage policymakers, regulators, thought-leaders, industry, and the public.

Funds from this grant support efforts by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) to build broad-based support from multiple stakeholder groups on options to address the nation’s nuclear waste challenges. To guide the overall effort, BPC will convene a high-level advisory council to provide project direction and serve as representatives when meeting with congressional and executive branch leadership. The three-to-five-member advisory council will be composed primarily of former members of the Secretary of Energy’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future and include individuals that span industry, nonproliferation, and environmental perspectives. Under the leadership of the advisory board, BPC will assess the level of support for and opposition to implementing the various proposals on nuclear waste management and disposal by hosting three full-day regional workshops, one in Washington and two elsewhere, to engage policymakers and stakeholders on the issues surrounding nuclear waste. Each workshop will begin with a brief stage-setting presentation by experts on the substance and status of the various proposals and then move to a structured discussion. Throughout the project, the BPC project team will also stand ready and, if requested, will assist legislators, regulators, and policy developers to better understand both technical and policy issues and stakeholders’ views.The project has been carefully designed to stay well clear of endorsing any particular policy proposal.