Glossary

Glossary of terms

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Africa@home - Africa@home is an interdisciplinary project the first phase of which allowed the Swiss Tropical Institute to run a malaria modelling project thanks to the BOINC technology. This was made possible through the multi-stakeholder partnership called Africa@home, which involves CERN, the University of Geneva, ICVolunteers], the World Health Organization, AIMS, several other African academic institutions, the Swiss Tropical Institute, and Informaticiens sans frontières (ISF), with the support of the Geneva International Academic Network.
AIMS - African Institute for Mathematical Sciences: www.aims.ac.za
AUF - Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie: www.auf.org
BOINC - Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is a software package which allows mobilizing computing and storage resources through the Internet. BOINC is client-server based. It facilitates complex scientific computing through distributed public computing resources. In that sense, it is a form of digital solidarity. BOINC is freely available and enables a range of different applications in an easy and fast fashion (Windows, Linux, Mac-OS and other operating systems compatible). The program functions like a traditional screen-saver. However, in addition to showing images, it also carries out useful computation in the background. Infrastructure.

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CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research: www.cern.ch
CEV - European Volunteer Centre: www.cev.be
CIVICUS - World Alliance for Citizen Participation: www.civicus.org
Cyber-volunteering - Volunteers get involved in local, regional and international projects for a period of several weeks or months, offering their skills in areas such as web or software development, system administration and content generation.
CyberVolunteers Program - The Program run by ICVolunteers which recruits, trains and coordinates volunteers with skills in information and communication technology (ICT) for development. Volunteers participate in local, regional and international projects for a period of several weeks or months, offering their skills in areas such as web or software development, system administration and content generation. The Program values in particular South-South exchanges, but also includes South-North and North-South cooperation. By doing so, it aims to help create a global information and shared knowledge society accessible to many. The CyberVolunteers Program benefits from the patronage of UNESCO-Switzerland:

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IAAP - International Association for Applied Psychology: www.iaap.org
ICTs - Information and Communication Technoloies, term that designates technologies related to the Internet and multimedia. The term also covers the notion of increased interactivity of these products and services targeting a non-specialized public. Through IT, telecommunications networks and audiovisuals, ICTs target the largest number.
ICTP - Centre International de Physique Théorique: www.ictp.it
IFRC - International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies: www.ifrc.org
ISF - Informaticiens sans frontières: http://isf.cern.ch
ISTM - Institut Supérieur Technologique de Montplaisir: www.lycee-montplaisir.org
ITU - International Telecommunications Union: www.itu.int
IUED - Graduate Institute for Development Studies: www.iued.org
MDG - Millennium Development Goals: www.un.org/millenniumgoals

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STI - Swiss Tropical Institute: www.sti.ch
Volunteer Computing --also called peer-to-peer computing, global computing or community computing-- uses computers offered on a volunteer basis by the general public to do complex scientific computing. It is currently being used in particular in molecular biology, medicine, climate studies, high energy physics and environmental sciences.
UNISWA - University of Swaziland: www.uniswa.sz
WHO - World Health Organization: www.who.int
WSIS - World Summit on the Information Society: www.wsis.org