You mean this - the primary WCG server?


Now we know the reason of the recent outage - the server was taken offline for a photo shooting :-)
Well, "meet a WCG team member".. we can meet them this way at least, since they no longer appear on the forums...

Yeah. I wish for more communications too. I tend to visit on weekends. But still, this stuff is fire and forget mostly for me, as long as I tick the "keep giving jobs" option.

Please know that we don't intentionally withhold information from the volunteers (unless we have to, e.g. before a paper is officially published). But sometimes, we just don't have enough information to accurately predict project end dates. The end date is determined by a range of factors, some are project-specific and others are not so easy to predict. In the past, when we've had a good idea of the end date, we've provided a heads up to the volunteers that the project is ending soon. But that's not always possible. We also acknowledge that the progress bars have been more misleading than helpful (due to our lack of ability to consistently and accurately predict end dates) and we are looking to replace them - although I don't anticipate that we'll be able to do so before Q3 of this year.

In the case of Smash Childhood Cancer, based on the available work and the amount of computing time the project is currently receiving, the project could end in a few weeks' time. But the researchers are considering adding more targets to screen drug candidates against. Whether those additional targets will be available before the current supply runs out, or we have to pause the project until additional targets are available, is still to be determined.

For the Clean Energy Project, the situation was very different. The project had been paused for some time, in anticipation of new types of work units to start running through World Community Grid. We and the Harvard team had spent some time testing and tweaking those types of work units, to no avail. In determining next steps, our primary question to the researchers is always "What would be most valuable to your research?". In this case, the Harvard team acknowledged that the current research application they were using on World Community Grid was imposing too many constraints on their current work and that a more efficient way of leveraging the generous amount of computing power World Community Grid volunteers provide, would be to switch to a new research application. That's how the decision was made to close phase 2 of the Clean Energy Project. And as soon as that decision was made, we announced it to the volunteers and closed down the project (since there was no work running for the project anyway). We have begun discussing next steps with Harvard and are evaluating a couple of different options in terms of research applications and project scope going forward. i.e. We aim to ensure that the researchers are getting the most value out of your donated computing power, even if it means changing project direction.

For the wider point about communications, I'd like to point out a few things. We meet with each research team once a month. During those meetings, we discuss everything from availability of work, analysis of the results, validity of the data, any papers they're working on, any conferences they're attending, any collaborations they're forming, any funding grants they're applying for, any changes in their team, any challenges they're facing, etc. And then, every few months, we ask them to draft an update to articulate that information (or at least whichever part of it they can talk about publicly), even if the update is no more than a few lines long. i.e. We agree that it's important to sustain a reasonable cadence of communications and work with the researchers closely to try to do so.

In short, please don't interpret these incidents as our lack of appreciation for the valuable contribution our members make. When we have information to share, we strive to do so.

Finally, as others have already noted, there is no World Community Grid office, we all work remotely.

@jhindo... Thanks for the detailed response.

1. We actually only need a 1 liner from time to time, such as "Based on the current work the project ends in April, but researchers are considering adding more work". The reaction from the community would have been very different to just have that 1 line a couple weeks ago. It really only takes 3 mins of effort to keep donors happy.

2. I hold WCG staff blameless in this matter, and I'm sure the vast majority would agree with me. The 1 liner updates should actually be from the researchers and not WCG staff. I've donated over 4 years of CPU time to this project, and it just seems rude that the researchers don't bother to spend 5 minutes to give a short update to us.

3. I propose a criteria be added before WCG takes on projects - for their work to be onboarded, researchers must agree to update donors with a 1 liner once per month in the forums. This way WCG staff don't have to be involved, and there is no need to check the wording etc.

Many thanks