♥️ Up to 20x your donation to SCI by May 9 ♥️ Also: Mar/April newsletter
Where your money goes and what we've been doing
Last year, we participated in a Gitcoin funding round and you all donated so much that we were able to fund nearly an entire year of work! We’d love to do that again to expand and support our current efforts. Until May 9, your donations will be matched up to 20x due to Gitcoin’s use of quadratic funding. The donation process is a little different than normal donation routes, but the whole process will take less than 10 minutes and will make a massive difference. Every matched donation, even $1, will increase the match amount of all of our other donations, so your $1 contribution can easily mean $20, and a $20 donation can be over $100! This is without a doubt the most effective way to support our work.
You can visit our donation page on Gitcoin here, and we have made a step-by-step video to explain how to donate. Donations on Gitcoin can only be made in crypto, so if you don’t have any yet, you can pick some up at any crypto exchange like Coinbase or Kraken.
Of course, you are always welcome to donate to us directly without a match via our site’s donation page. We take Paypal, ETH, and GRC. And you can support us every time you shop at Amazon and eBay by visiting our donation page first. You pay the same price for items, but we receive a commission when you shop using our link.
We have an all volunteer board, your donations will go directly to re-connecting the public with science and building out the tools for the next generation of scientists. Here’s just a few of the things we’ve been doing over the past two months.
Bug Bounties Are Taking Off ✈️
We funded a number of bug bounties for BOINC and Gridcoin this month, which will produce critical bug fixes (BOINC has no functional Linux packaging!) and enhance user-friendliness. There are over $1,000 in bounties up for grabs, two of which have already been claimed and merged into the code. We will continue to add bounties over the year, so keep an eye peeled if you are a developer and want to contribute to science. You can contribute directly to these bounties or claim them via our Github repo.
ETH Denver (Conference)
We played a major role in sponsoring the DeSci segment at ETH Denver, bringing together many developers and researchers on the bleeding edge of using decentralized/web3 technology to advance scientific research. Importantly, as always, the SCI provided a project-neutral, non-profit platform for DeSci networking and collaboration.
BOINC Workshop (Conference)
We made several presentations at this year’s BOINC workshop, the yearly conference about BOINC. We outlined our goals for supporting the BOINC software, presented the results of the BOINC census, and introduced people to our Microgrid project which will connect researchers to volunteer computing power. Click the links to see the videos if you want to learn more.
BOINC Census
We released the results of the BOINC census, our yearly effort to find out who uses BOINC and why. This information will be used to inform promotional efforts and help BOINC projects better understand how to reach their user base.
Networking
Much of what happens behind the scenes at SCI is meetings and other administrative tasks. These aren’t too exciting to report on (or participate in!) but they are important force multipliers to find places we can coordinate efforts with other organizations. Nearly every week this past two months we have had a high-level organizational meeting with a BOINC project or other member of the DeSci ecosystem.
Coming up next time: more bounties, a BOINC promotional campaign to universities, improvements to BOINC’s researcher documentation, and more.