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Volunteering Made Easy
Matthew Blumberg, a New York-based Web developer, felt helpless when his father's cancer drugs became ineffective. The doctors searching for a new medication knew what they were looking for, but the process of discovery was—and is—slow.
"At a certain level, it's a computational problem," Blumberg says. "They were looking for a protein that had a particular structure that would have a particular function."
Hoping to help, Blumberg joined a volunteer computing project studying the three-dimensional shape of proteins. As his PC crunched data, he wondered why more people weren't volunteering. If everybody helped, the problem could be solved.
But most people have never heard of volunteer computing, he says, and those who have, for the most part, consider it beyond their technical competence. They don't bother to try.
That's why he founded GridRepublic, a Web site where finding and volunteering for BOINC-based projects is "point-and-click easy," he says.
To volunteer, all people need to do is sign up, select projects of interest to them and download a file. Then, whenever they're despondent over an ailing relative, the boiling earth or a lonely space alien, they can look at their PC and know "I'm doing something," Blumberg says.
GridRepublic aims to increase participation in volunteer computing by at least a factor of 10. Such an increase in computing power could drive a wave of insight and discovery that reaches across all domains of human endeavor, Blumberg says.
"The interesting thing of all this volunteer computing stuff is the sense in which it empowers people to be part of something," he says.
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Roach frequently writes about technology, science and the environment for National Geographic News. He lives in Seattle.
