Zooniverse
The world's largest people-powered research platform, from galaxy classification to wildlife camera traps.
About
Zooniverse is the largest online platform for people-powered research, run as a nonprofit with NASA grant support. Volunteers classify images, galaxies, light curves, wildlife camera traps, and their answers are aggregated into research datasets; in June 2026 the platform passed one billion total classifications from more than three million participants. It began in 2007 as Galaxy Zoo, founded by Oxford's Chris Lintott and Minnesota's Lucy Fortson, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy named it a Champion of Open Science in 2023. Researchers build projects with the free Project Builder and export classifications as CSV or JSON. The stack is open source under Apache-2.0. For ML teams it is a proven way to get large volumes of labeled data from motivated volunteers instead of paid annotators, with aggregation and consensus built into the model.
What it can do
- Free Project Builder for custom classification workflows
- Volunteer classification with built-in aggregation and consensus
- Subject sets across images, video, audio, and text
- CSV and JSON data exports
- Discussion (Talk) boards per project
- Open-source Apache-2.0 platform stack
Setup
Build a project in the free Project Builder at zooniverse.org/lab and launch it to volunteers.
Prerequisites
A research question and a dataset of subjects to classify. No payment required.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 1 billion classifications reached June 2026; 3M+ volunteers; NASA grantee; White House Champion of Open Science 2023; open-source stack actively maintained. Strengths: unmatched scale for volunteer labeling, free to use, strong institutional backing, transparent aggregation methodology. Docked for: (1) volunteer throughput suits research timelines, not enterprise SLAs; (2) quality depends on aggregation design per project. License: Apache-2.0 (platform code).
★ 111 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · 1 billion classifications reached June 2026 (Univ. of Minnesota, NASA); 3M+ volunteers; 31 NASA-sponsored projects, 96 publications.
- · Co-founded 2007 as Galaxy Zoo by Chris Lintott (Oxford) and Lucy Fortson (Minnesota); White House Champion of Open Science 2023.
- · Free Project Builder; CSV/JSON exports; front-end monorepo (111 stars) actively maintained.
- · Manual review: verified via NASA and university sources; enterprise-SLA limitation noted honestly.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.