**3.2 Active participation projects**

172 Environmental Monitoring

By passive participation, we refer essentially to the relatively new phenomenon of allowing one's personal home (or work) computer to be used as a computational resource for studies that require significant computer power which may not be directly available due to funding considerations or due to prior commitments in using resources that are locally available. This essentially free and extensive network of computational power can be an extremely invaluable tool to the researcher who has need of it. This type of participation, while not necessarily providing the participating citizen with physical or intellectual involvement, does give the participant the emotional satisfaction of knowing that he or she is contributing to the understanding or resolution of a problem in which he or she is particularly interested. Aside from installing the software and choosing which projects to support, there is no further participation on the part of the volunteer---all computations run in the background while the user is using the computer for other functions, or when the computer is idle. One benefit to this level of participation is that the home user maintains complete control over which projects to support, the timing of the support, and how much computer processing power to allocate. Several examples are

SETI@home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/, accessed July 2011) was the first monitoring project to make use of tens of thousands of personal home computers to process data (Anderson et al., 2002). SETI, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has a scientific goal of detecting intelligent life outside of the Earth. One part of SETI involves using large radio telescopes to monitor for the presence of narrowbandwidth radio signals from outer space which, if detected, would likely be indicative of intelligent origin, since such signals are not known to occur naturally. As of July 2011, SETI@home had more than 1.2 million users, with more than 155,000 actually active when it was accessed, representing 204 countries and over 493 TeraFLOPS average floating point operations per second (http://boincstats.com/stats/project\_graph.php?pr=sah,

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/, accessed July 2011) was originally designed to combat the falsification of data by some users of the SETI@home program. BOINC is an open-source software designed for volunteer computing. Since its inception in 2002, it has provided volunteer users worldwide with the opportunity to, among many other things, assist with such endeavours as long-term climate modelling at Oxford University in the UK (http://climateprediction.net, accessed July 2011), help with epidemiological modelling of malaria outbreaks being studied at the Swiss Tropical Institute (http://www.malariacontrol.net/, accessed July 2011), help the Planetary Science Institute monitor and study the hazard posed by near-Earth asteroids (http://orbit.psi.edu/oah/, accessed July 2011), and assist Stanford University in the United States (U.S.) with the monitoring of earthquakes to improve understanding of seismicity in an effort to aid with earthquake preparedness planning (http://qcn.stanford.edu/). The "Quake-Catcher" network, as it is called, is also proactive in involving public schools, providing free educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake

provided below.

**3.1.1 SETI@home** 

accessed July 2011).

preparedness (Cochran et al., 2009).

**3.1.2 BOINC** 

Active participation refers to those programs that require participants to take an active role in the collection of and/or observation of data, and to record, enter, or otherwise transmit those data. While internet and phone app technologies are usually components of these projects as well, it is often the citizen scientist who must actively enter the data.
