Micro-volunteering is smart (as long as it doesn’t replace actual volunteering). For pretty much no effort or cost, you can contribute to something big. I’ve already blogged 2 great sites, SearchKindly.org and FreeRice.com.

Now check out World Community Grid, where you can ‘donate’ your computer’s idle processing ability, which would otherwise be wasted.

Even when you are using your computer, it rarely needs to use all of its processing strength. And when you get up to answer the phone, or take a lunch break, or leave your computer on overnight, it just sits there idly. World Community Grid is one of several organisations which harnesses that wasted computer power for good, processing research data. (You might remember Seti@home, which was doing this years ago to look for aliens)

Basically, a small program works in the background when you don’t need all your processing power to process data, which is then combined with thousands of other computers. It creates a system with massive computational power, far surpassing that of a handful of supercomputers. Research time is reduced from years to months, and costs of research are slashed so money can be used more elsewhere.

I’ve been trying it out this week, and I’m very impressed. It hasn’t made any difference at all to my computer’s speed (and if you are worried about that, set the program to ‘low priority’ [or get a techie to do it] and when your computer feels the strain this program will be the first to stop using resources)

It’s smart, free, ridiculously easy, pretty quick to install, takes none of your time once set up, and even pretty fun. Why wouldn’t you get on-board?

(If you identify as part of CCEC, put ‘CCEC eXtreme‘ in your team name when you sign up. Being part of a team makes it more fun, so if you aren’t CCEC, find another to join.)

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