eScience in the Social Cloud

Social networks offer great potential for fostering collaboration between individuals and amongst groups. This potential collaborative environment is not only applicable for recreation, but can also provide considerable value to diverse research communities. For this reason scientists are increasingly utilizing social networking concepts in projects to form groups, share information, publicize their work and communicate with their peers. This article describes two different approaches to supporting eScience, by providing scientific computing and collaboration within what we term the Social Cloud. In our first approach the social network is used as a collaborative overlay, in combination with the ad hoc creation of infrastructure composed of virtual machine clusters built from resources contributed, by the users, to the Social Cloud. Our second approach is based around the principle of volunteer computing, where the Social Cloud provides researchers with a platform to exploit social networks by reaching out to non technical users who would otherwise be unlikely to donate computational time for scientific and other research. In this article we specifically explore the motivations of users to contribute computational time and examine the various ways these motivations can be catered to through the use of incentives in existing social networks.