This is my first post on the Billion Brain Blog, so a few words of explanation about the name of the blog are in order.

This blog is about my views on citizen cyberscience, that is to say all sorts of scientific initiatives that are benefiting in one way or other from support of volunteers on the Web.

Citizen cyberscience takes many forms. It can involve simply providing idle CPU cycles from volunteer PCs. But it can also involve considerable quantities of volunteer brain power, for example helping to analyze images from some of the world’s most advanced telescopes or transcribe writing on ancient herbaria samples from museum archives. You name it, and there is probably a citizen cyberscience project somewhere doing it.

Today there are about a million people actively involved in citizen cyberscience, but the title of this blog reveals my own aspirations: what would happen if a billion people took part? What problems could the world solve with the dedicated efforts of a billion brains? What problems couldn’t we solve?!

I said this blog is about my views, but it is also about YOUR views. I’m aware that I only know about a small fraction of all the neat things that are happening on the Web, involving science and citizens. I want to learn more, and I’m looking forward to comments that surprise and inspire me and other readers of this blog.

So I’m looking forward to blogging, and even more to hearing your comments about this blog. One brain at a time.

Francois

PS I found this brain-related theme for the blog amongst all the billions of WordPress options. Thanks to Sonji Carella at Art House Web Design for the nice work.

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