Interesting developments in DC / DThinking - v .09b

[caferace]

First up, the Economist article which is broad ranging, but also discuses BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation) to some extent:

...Bossa nova

To lower the barrier to entry for projects like this, Dr Anderson recently launched a new open-source platform called BOSSA (Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation), which aims to do for ?distributed thinking? what BOINC has done for distributed computing. One of Dr Anderson's first customers for BOSSA is Peter Amoako-Yirenkyi of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, who is working with other African researchers and a research group called UNOSAT, which processes digital-satellite data for various United Nations agencies.

ref: http://www.economist.com/print....cfm?story_id=10202635

And then, BOSSA itself:

Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation (Bossa)

Bossa is a software infrastructure for creating projects that use skills or knowledge of large numbers of volunteers, via the Internet, to accomplish a set of tasks. This has been variously termed skill aggregation, distributed thinking, and human computing.

Bossa is designed to accommodate a wide range of tasks. In particular:

* Tasks may be short (performed online via a single web page) or may take several weeks and involve running separate programs.
* Tasks may be performed by a single user or by a group of cooperating users.
* Tasks may be unvalidated, automatically validated, or validated by comparing redundant instances.

Bossa consists of a MySQL database schema and a set of PHP pages. Projects install these components on their server, and add their own PHP scripts to generate, show, and handle tasks. Bossa uses BOINC Basics for grouping and communication, and can use BOLT for volunteer training.

ref: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro

-jim

 

[petrusbroder]

Thanks for the very interesting read, Jim.

Seems like a very good idea - may help in quite a few projects ...