Easy and low cost access to the Internet is giving birth to a new style of volunteering. Connected via cyber space, people from remote and under-represented areas of society can be contributors in many project domains with great social value.

This Workshop provides a forum to discuss the latest trends in CyberVolunteering and how they can help in tackling many of our common global challenges. We will show you some examples of the real and would-be projects based on volunteer computing and collective thinking, i.e. voluntary supply of information over the Internet.

What is CyberVolunteering in reality?

Malariacontrol.net is a volunteer computing project that uses BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) to provide the computing power necessary for large scale simulation models of Malaria epidemiology and control. So far, more than 25,000 volunteers from all over the world have contributed the equivalent of 3,000 years of computing on a PC.

We will also demonstrate BOINC, an extremely popular system which harnesses PC and human data processing power volunteered over the Internet.

CyberVolunteering also may be a powerful support for languages and music around the world.

“Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Fifteenth edition)” reported that there are 6,912 known living languages in the world. However, most of them are not Search Engine friendly, due to multiple encoding issues and lack of support for under-represented languages. The Language Observatory Project (LOP) aims at surveying the use of languages over the Internet as a means of creating public awareness of the “Digital Language Divide”. Volunteers have a role to play in improving the project and bringing creative ideas on how to make use of LOP resources to enrich the Internet and its communities.

Music, meanwhile, has been called the one “common language” of all peoples and it is a powerful tool for cross-cultural communication. Due to the increasing globalization of media and music distribution, musicians who practice traditional/ethnic instruments and performance styles are giving up in despair at their lack of access to broadcasting and Internet opportunities. Ethnomusicologists report that at least five musical cultures/languages are being lost per year worldwide. Through the assistance and talents of CyberVolunteers, we now have the opportunity to offer these esteemed cultural representatives the chance to share their traditions and talents with a global audience, and to spread awareness of the cause. Please listen at the conference while we share some concrete examples of how we can indeed leverage the power of Cyberspace to give life to a number of “forgotten” music cultures!

That said, the most resourceful participant in the Workshop is YOU.

Let’s discuss what we can do to make CyberVolunteerism even more effective and help tackle global challenges, facilitate human dialogue and preserve cultural knowledge.

If you:
- want to do something really meaningful for the world in your spare time.
- want to be a part of research efforts to tackle global challenges such as malaria.
- are concerned about cultural issues such as the future of minority languages and disappearing musical traditions.
- want to discuss new and future opportunities for volunteers to support cultural diversity and contribute to humanitarian causes.

Please join us!

Workshop team:

Viola Krebs, ICVolunteers
Chew Yew Choong, LOP, Nagaoka University of Technology
Donna Stoering, passportM
Christian Pellegrini, University of Geneva
Ben Segal, CERN
Yoshiko Kurisaki, ICVolunteers