What are other examples of interactive - "volunteer needed" type websites?

November 19, 2009 9:02 PM

What are other examples of interactive - "volunteers needed" type websites like WheresGeorge.com, CoCoRaHS, BOINC, Folding@home, Geocaching, BookCrossing?
posted by MrBCID to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Galaxy Zoo, where one gets to classify galaxies.
posted by spaghettification at 9:04 PM on November 19, 2009

Degree Confluence Project.
posted by jessamyn at 9:22 PM on November 19, 2009

Wikipedia.
GasBuddy.
posted by SisterHavana at 9:35 PM on November 19, 2009

Project Gutenberg uses volunteers to proofread text and record audiobooks.
posted by stefanie at 9:46 PM on November 19, 2009

The word you're looking for here is Crowdsourcing. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is probably the current book on the subject if you're interested.

The Wikipedia page on Crowdsourcing (itself, written by the crowd) has a lengthy list of exactly these types of projects.

Finally, we can add Metafilter itself to our list of crowdsourced websites...
posted by zachlipton at 10:16 PM on November 19, 2009

Similar to BOINC, there's GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
posted by jingzuo at 11:27 PM on November 19, 2009

Along the science/math lines of Folding@Home, there's Seti@home, distributed.net, and fold.it - which is a user-active process as opposed to just a spare cycles one.
posted by knile at 4:07 AM on November 20, 2009