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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: How to Get More People Involved |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 75
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Coleslaw
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Mar 29, 2007 Post Count: 1343 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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And IT is going to give the largest pushback as they tend to be underfunded in most places and do not want the extra responsibility of certifying applications, monitoring non-work related PC issues, struggling to keep the day to day going while trying to "give free resources" to entities that MIGHT have a positive outcome in some way.
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Richard Mitnick
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Feb 28, 2007 Post Count: 583 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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WCG is doing their job, getting onto Facebook and Twitter.
----------------------------------------It is questionable how much the individual projects are doing in social media. Some are posting updates. But many are not. The articles can be about the project, the science, latest news, latest results and, guess what- the scientists. OpenZika does well here. faah2 has had a couple of articles on Facebook, as have some of the completed projects like the Clean Water project. Everyone must sing out to their constituencies: families, friends, co-workers, everyone who follows them will see each Facebbok post or Twitter tweet. I personally do not think any appeal to employers will do any good, but, hey, if 100 people approach 100 companies and we get one company with 500 desktops, or tablets, or phones, that is worth all of the trying. So, I am not saying give up on it. I actually approached my wife's oncologist. He did not attach, but his father living in South America attached and ran WCG for "Say No to Schistosoma". Hey, I spoke to one guy, he got one guy. Not a bad ratio. Keep up the drum beat. |
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Richard Mitnick
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Feb 28, 2007 Post Count: 583 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Someone came to the blog to check it out. I appreciate that.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The main reason why no company will currently consider it worth all the costs and hurdles, is I think because there isn't enough hype. If a company could claim to have contributed 100 years per day for curing cancer in WCG, the media wouldn't care or know whether that's exciting or not.
----------------------------------------As I said, first you must make yourself viral, so that companies get motivated to seek WCG by themselves. Trying to push as PR benefit something that the wider public doesn't know about won't work. Even when you succeed to some extent to publicize WCG within nerd communities (and all such efforts are very valuable), it won't give you this kind of mass spread. Only the kind of mass awareness Apple has (cliche but true) can motivate companies to mass deploy WCG. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Aug 18, 2016 4:19:09 AM] |
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vlado101
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jul 23, 2013 Post Count: 226 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Nobody is denying the large amount of untapped computing power out in the corporate world and I hate to keep sounding like a "wet blanket" but there is the ideal world and the realistic world. In my case, and probably others too, there is the corporate politics that get involved. Imagine for instance, someone in Dept A tries to run a business function on a corporate machine and it fails, lets say due to memory issues. Diagnostics show that BOINC is in the top 5 users of the machine memory. Regardless of whether BOINC was the culprit or not, it isn't a business function. I can tell you, no executive is going to want his neck on the line for that especially if it resulted in a missed deadline that causes the company to be subject to sanctions. I'm thinking the best approach might be to pursue it on a departmental level at first and let it grow naturally through the corporation through positive feedback. The natural place to start would be IT... I would have to agree with Doneske. I am not critisizing or saying that this post does not have any good ideas, but it seems like we are all just talking about how to get that one big whale or unicorn ( or what ever saying you want to use) big company that will go through the process and install this on every laptop/desktop/server. I honestly don't see that happening even for good PR. For example if your a banking or in finance would it really help your PR that you donated to WCG? I really think that the future of the survival of WCG (and BOINC for that matter) lies in the community of individual cruncher and teams that are currently enrolled to donate their spare cycles. I actually saw that on WCG Facebook page a post that said tell us what you think would attract users. By the way this forum discussion is going they should have changed the name to "How to change your employer's mind about letting their company running BOINC". Again I am not trying to be snippy and a lot of people her have given very good reasons and ideas, but I feel like we are just going round and round with users saying that company X would want to donate for reasons a,b, and c and the other group saying that it would not. In my opinion, the best way to attract new member would be to have a good social media presence, an intuitive site, and also a way (real time or not, but faster than the research page) that tells you how many more units are left. That idea might not be feasible, not usable, or to veteran crunchers useless, but that is a step in the right way because instead of focusing on a company that might or might not (I honestly thing they won't) we are focusing on average Joe that might have no idea what this is. Focusing on small items and on individual cruncher and asking the question "Why would I average Joe want to donate?" would be the better way. How to attract those average users, keep them here, and keep them engaged should be the focus on this forum, and the reasons why someone would leave. Again I do not mean to offend anyone here. I do really like the idea of getting companies involved. Maybe I am just too cynical that a company would make that financial sacrifice.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
One last point before I quit this thread, I don't understand (and haven't for the past couple of years) this desire to recruit new contributors when WCG can't adequately support the ones they have. You have contributors now that want to contribute to HST but can't get work, UGM is limited due to the size of the upload files and the lack of disk space on the backend to store results before being sent to the researchers, Some folks can't run FAH2 due to the trickle requirement and a need for 24/7 network connection. Then there are the issues and problems brought to light by the existing contributors that go unanswered for weeks and even months (HTTP errors and certificate problems come to mind but there have been others). If there were a significant increase in contributors over a short period of time, the back end would most likely fall apart. You would start seeing database problems, validator issues, file transfer problems due to bandwith, server, and/or CDN/Swift storage, projects constantly out of work due to the stress on the load scripts and/or researchers unable to generate work fast enough. We constantly hear how the WCG staff is busy so how are they going to support the problems resulting from increased volume?
----------------------------------------Like they say, be careful what you ask for....... [Edit 1 times, last edit by Doneske at Aug 18, 2016 1:31:25 PM] |
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Sid2
Senior Cruncher USA Joined: Jun 12, 2007 Post Count: 259 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Much of the discussion in this forum understandably centers on technical questions - adding more machines, "me" crunching more numbers, etc. I'd like to discuss how we can get more individuals involved in this endeavor. There are billions of idle processors out there. Let's see how we can make those idle processors start contributing to science. Thoughts? The discussion then centered on businesses and corporations sponsoring WCG crunching on their systems/networks. How about the private individuals? . . . so many don't know BOINC and WCG exist. How about making coffee cups, T-shirts and bumper stickers available at a reasonable price to raise awareness?  |
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we4qcphi8
Cruncher Joined: Jul 28, 2016 Post Count: 26 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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@Doneske:
----------------------------------------One last point before I quit this thread, I don't understand (and haven't for the past couple of years) this desire to recruit new contributors when WCG can't adequately support the ones they have. You have contributors now that want to contribute to HST but can't get work, UGM is limited due to the size of the upload files and the lack of disk space on the backend to store results before being sent to the researchers, Some folks can't run FAH2 due to the trickle requirement and a need for 24/7 network connection. I run BOINC with WCG default settings on several machines, and do work for one project (OpenZika). When that project is done, I will move to another. I am the first to admit that I am a newbie, and a not-very-technically-savy contributer. But if my understanding is correct (and do correct me if I'm wrong), the real power in grid computing is in leveraging the resources of non-experts like me. Perhaps it's misguided, but this article addresses a lack of contributors. https://www.inverse.com/article/6592-supercomputer-boinc-update HST, UGM and FAH2 are all acronyms that are unfamiliar to me, and definitely would be unfamiliar to the people I would recruit. I hope that WCG is able to adaquetely support the work my machines are doing for OpenZika, or else I'm wasting time and energy. My desire to recruit new contributors comes from the simple idea that the more people run BOINC/WCG/[fill in the project], the faster the percentage will get to 100% for that project on this page: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/viewAllProjects.do Is it not a good thing to get more people crunching numbers, and hence a faster completion of the active WCG projects? @vlado101: I feel like we are just going round and round with users saying that company X would want to donate for reasons a,b, and c and the other group saying that it would not. Having posited an idea, and after participating in this discussion, I feel like I have learned a lot, and potentially saved a lot of wasted energy. So it's been worthwhile from my perspective. [Edit 3 times, last edit by we4qcphi8 at Aug 18, 2016 4:06:33 PM] |
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Splor
Cruncher Joined: May 21, 2015 Post Count: 1 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Got many people to join by creating a WCG thread on an online forum. 200+ in less than a year. http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/viewTeamInfo.do?teamId=1WZJMC7X02
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
This is precisely what Gridcoin has been attempting to do since 2013: provide sufficient monetary incentive for people to start running Boinc projects and so far it has succeeded.
----------------------------------------Gridcoin is essentially a digital currency, like Bitcoin, but the miners are required to complete Boinc tasks to mint the coins, so the mining process isn't wasteful. WCG could potentially hand out Gridcoin to get people to start crunching for WCG. In the past three years, team Gridcoin has become the top Boinc team in the entire world based on daily RAC: http://boincstats.com/en/stats/-5/team/list/16/0#1 which essentially proves that monetary incentives in distributed computing are very effective! Official site: gridcoin.us [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Aug 18, 2016 11:06:27 PM] |
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