Part of the Government IT glossary:

Be a Martian! is a government 2.0 initiative that invite citizens to participate in scientific research about the planet Mars by visiting an interactive web site and performing research tasks disguised as games. 

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Visitors, who are called “citizen scientists,” assist NASA scientists by counting craters and matching photos to help improve Martian Maps. 

The site also serves as a way to help the federal government learn first-hand about how to use cloud computing delivery models. The Be a Martian! site is built on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-as-service (PaaS).  

See also: crowdsourcing, Mechanical Turk, government cloud computing plan

Learn more about Be a Martian!:

Enroll as a virtual Martian citizen and start exploring. 

This was last updated in July 2010
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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