CONGRATULATIONS JONATHAN FIGDOR ON REACHING 500,000 MOT POINTS !!!

Again, I hope you MOT members don't mind an outsider's viewpoint, but I am a bit alarmed by the recent talk of mass exodus from WCG. Not only in this thread, but also in others. I cannot figure out why that is, all of a sudden.

I started DC about a decade ago with SETI and happily crunched until I decided Life Sciences was the direction for me. Back then SETI also had it's growing pains with lots of server downtime and an extremely antiquated method of gathering and sharing information. But, it was being operated by volunteers, so professionalism had to evolve. The objective and results of searching for ET was quite clear.

After that I spent 6 years with Grid.org (it wasn't called that in the beginning) crunching for a cancer cure. Again, this project suffered from many growing pains. Too many to mention here, but the most irritating was we faced server downtime for days at a time. Luckily there was a forum to glean information, but this was also run by volunteers. Volunteers that tried hard, but didn't always get timely answers to the problems. It wasn’t as clear at SETI as to whether or not our crunching was finding answers, but there was optimism.
Finally, the mechanics of the project smoothed out, but the forums became in disarray. So much so that I left the forums to the idiots, troublemakers and any others that cowardly hide behind their online anonymity.

When Grid.org finally closed it’s doors, our team captain enticed us all to join WCG. It’ll be a year in April and so far I have been very impressed with the mechanics (virtually no downtime) and the speed with which the admins and techs tackle the problems. Yes, you may run into a CA that appears to be having a bad day, but we’re dealing with volunteers again. Professionalism has to be honed. I have no idea as to the success of our crunching, but I still remain optimistic that our results are being put to good use.

I’ve done some reading up on other projects and they all seem to suffer from one problem or another. All I’m trying to say is there probably isn’t a perfect DC project. One that fits everyone’s ideals.

So, please don’t be too hasty to leave the project. Although it took a challenge to get our two teams to communicate, it has been a pleasure to have bantered back and forth with all of you.

As a footnote, I put this together earlier and before Keith posted his very eloquent novelettes.

Yes, I agree. It does seem sudden to me too. It may be more of a frustration level though. I've seen some of it over in courine's team thread but I wonder if it's something that's more visible in the project fora? I haven't really been following them lately - there's just not enough hours in the day. However, having been around since the beginning (less two days to be precise), it does seem we have somewhat reqular cycles here of particular events. More and more, I'm drawing parallels with the real world non-profits. There may be something to gain from that.



I don't know about that claim of eloquence but I'll be the first to admit that conciseness is NOT one of my strong points.

19-16=3

Dataman--you didnt start anything with me--i should have stayed home i saw you posted over in courines thread and was curious and started looking around--then i posted in Aids@ home thread to ChtristineMH and asked her a question and dicktactless injected some crap in the conversation--you can read it there. I am REALLY tired of some of the Admins treating us like stupid sheep-not answering questions or just putting us off--you can only imagine how much money we are saving this project and they treat the members like dog shit!!! This crap about being kid friendly is getting on my nerves also Where the hell do they live in some fantasy world