In the Beijing Mozilla Hackfest, which I reported on a while ago, one of the highlights was having the talented designer André-Pierre Olivier in our midst. APO, as he is known by many, is the creative force behind Grid Café and many other educational websites about science and technology. APO is also a big fan of citizen cyberscience. In fact, he’s in the process of creating an island in a virtual world for citizen cyberscience, which I’m very excited about. More about that on another occasion.

What I’m really pleased about this week is the result of a vote by Chinese citizen cyberscience enthusiasts on their favourite logo, from a series that APO designed as part of his contribution to the Beijing hackfest. The logo is for the Computing for Clean Water project, which is run by my colleagues at Tsinghua University with the support of IBM’s World Community Grid.

What I’m particularly pleased about is that the Chinese community behind the equn.com website, a Chinese-language infohub about volunteer computing, spontaneously set up and ran the vote. Some of the equn.com crowd were at the hackfest, so this is not a complete surprise. But what’s good is that they voted on all possible logos, and came up with a clear winner that makes a lot of sense – see above. We’d considered pre-selecting just a few we thought were viable, but decided that this was too patronizing. The wisdom of crowds should not be second-guessed.

That’s a small step for democracy, but a giant leap (well, ok, a modest but encouraging leap!) for collaboration between volunteers, scientists and the sorts of web designers and programmers who could add a great deal of value to existing citizen cyberscience projects.

To see the full result of the voting, and the other great logos APO created, check out this forum thread.

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