ICVolunteers at LIFT-09

Jonathan Marks reports from the LIFT-09 Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 2009. Watch the video online.

"As the end of the last century came to a close, I remember downloading a little programme called  SETI at home. The idea was to help scientists in California search for extra terrestrial intelligence by "donating" a bit of your home computer's processing power.

Since then other projects have started using the same concept. During the LIFT-09, ICVolunteers organised a fascinating workshop on different ways people can volunteeer their IC skills and/or computing power.

It seems that several universities in Africa are using this combined distributed computing power to solve problems like the tracking of the spread of Malaria. Johns Hopkins University has an on-going study about the value being supplied by volunteers worldwide and it turns out to be staggering".