Last week I was in Brazil, lecturing about citizen cyberscience (Brasilia, Rio, Sao Paulo – see my comments in the Citizen Cyberscience Centre blog). Last month I did the same in India (Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai). Since I’m based in China, it’s interesting to compare how these three countries – often linked because of their size and similar states of economic development – fare in terms of generating citizen cyberscience projects, and participating in them.

Fortunately, my colleague Lucas Mation, from the economics think-tank IPEA in Brasilia, recently made that comparison easier by plotting where various projects are based, and how much CPU time different countries are providing to volunteer computing projects. With his permission, I include the resulting maps below.

 

 

There are a lot of provisos when trying to make such maps. Lucas focused on projects that run on the BOINC, World Community Grid and Zooniverse platforms. There are loads of other projects that belong in the category citizen cyberscience, and which use their own custom platforms. But the general trend agrees with what I’ve observed, namely that China and Brazil are considerably more active than India in this space.

Why is that? It can’t be language barriers, because of the three countries, India ought to have the easiest access to the predominantly English-speaking world of citizen cyberscience projects. It can’t be internet penetration – India is ahead of Brazil in number of Internet users (over 100m in India to an estimated 75m in Brazil). Bandwidth could play a role, as could pricing schemes for internet access. My Indian hosts suggested cultural aspects: volunteerism is perhaps not as strong a social value in India as elsewhere. That is an intriguing thought, though it would need a lot more research to back it up.

But perhaps the most interesting explanation is simply that of chicken-and-egg. There are no major projects hosted in India yet, while through IBM’s World Community Grid there are projects in Brazil and China. And so my ambition in the coming months is to kickstart some projects in India that could bring more attention to citizen cyberscience in the subcontinent. I’m looking for Indian researchers with ideas for using either volunteer computing or volunteer thinking on a big scale. I’m keen to put them in touch with people already running citizen cyberscience projects, in order to generate new projects. And if all goes well, I hope to organize an event in India towards the end of the year to help make these connections happen. That sort of networking is part of what the Citizen Cyberscience Centre is all about.

At some level, I’m hoping that the example of Brazil and China will encourage Indian scientists to apply this low-cost technology to their research. And I have a sneaking suspicion that once they get going, Indian researchers will become major exponents of citizen cyberscience. So all suggestions welcome!

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