For several years in the late '90s I engaged the Mars anomalists in skeptical yet civil debate over their "finds", the famous Face, the sand worms, the cast-off alien artifacts littering Mars like a planetary junkyard, and on and on. I was struck by a similar thought: Regardless of their eccentric agenda, the simple fact was that the anomalists represent thousands of eyeballs poring over hundreds of thousands of planetary images; and I had that nightmare about overlooking their one genuine find because of implacably hostile skepticism. With a little professional guidance they could have been turned into a corps of planetary Baker Street Irregulars, just as the hordes of amateur astronomers perform a vital observational service for astronomy.

I couldn't help but notice, though, that the baseline eccentricity of the anomalists was often transformed into defiant weirdness by the disdain and insult heaped upon them by a handful of the professionals. They'd been radicalized, transformed from mere eccentrics puttering about with an offbeat hobby, into conspiracy theorists and paranoiacs determined to hit back loudly and publicly.

The squeaky wheels always get the grease, and it took a while to determine that not all professionals, and probably not even a majority of professionals, took so hostile an attitude toward the anomalists. The nonhostile pros, though, kept quiet, because some of the most hostile of the pros just happened to be principal investigators and contractors who controlled who got access to the returned data. Nevertheless, in quiet ways, below the radar, I've seen a few cases of professional scientists working with anomalists to their mutual benefit.

I think that the kind of collaboration you're talking about, ER, isn't impossible and it's a great idea, it's just very tricky when there are controversial claims involved. You have to deal not only with the psychology of the situation, but the professional politics too.

Being a forum kinda guy, I've thought about specific features of the collaborative environment required to support a corps of scientific amateurs feeding their best results to the pros. You need a formal reporting system, with a defined format that solicts information and acts as a checklist. You need a system of posting reports, and a system for collecting feedback and analysis, and incorporating into an electronic "case file". You need a way to store and present evidentiary and supporting materials such as images, video, and sometimes audio, in addition to textual reports.

The technical basics are simple; what's more interesting is the organizational structure. Implicit in the idea is that the benefit for professionals is time savings, which means that the amateurs themselves must filter the reports on the frontline to ensure that the busy pros only deal with the most solid reports. This in turn implies a hierarchy of amateurs, with the most experienced and most level-headed filtering the input from the ranker amateurs.

I confess that I hoped that keeping a lid on the hostility and verbal violence of our militantly-scientific minority might have let discussions of the offbeat flourish on OffTopic and lead to the kind of rigorous analysis we're talking about. But alas, it was not to be. Perhaps having a "ZoneFiles" board in the new architecture might lead to something like that. But only time will tell.