Collective Source is the independent consulting practice of Nathan Wilson. For more than thirty years I've built large-scale data systems, AI/ML, and open-source scientific infrastructure — and led the teams that keep them running.
That work spans research, industry, and the arts: directing biodiversity informatics for the Encyclopedia of Life at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where I grew the database to 1.3M taxa, built TraitBank, and served as principal investigator on $7M in grants; leading globally distributed engineering teams at IQVIA and MassChallenge; and, earlier, modernizing the production pipeline at DreamWorks Animation across thirteen feature films.
The throughline is open-source, community-driven systems for science. I founded Mushroom Observer in 2006 — now one of the largest community platforms for fungal observation and identification — and I still write its code, build machine-learning tools on its data, and steward it for the long term.
Today I bring that combination of hands-on engineering and senior leadership to research, nonprofit, and mission-driven teams — helping them design, build, and ship the systems they depend on, with particular care for the kind of small, durable, open infrastructure that the scientific record quietly relies on.