There doesn't seem to be good place to post my thoughts where the power that be will see it, so this seems to be as good as it gets.


For some us, this project is more then just the credits. There are a lot of quiet folks for whom the research are topics that hit close to him. For me, it's cancer research and especially close to home, Childhood Cancer.

The communication comes in spurts and all seems reactive. The response to troubles to the mechanics behind the scenes seem reactive too. There doesn't seem to be a PROactive approach things.

Granted the project was inherited and IBM provided seemingly provided just another support to carry it over to Krembil and then went 'So long, good luck with the upgrades.' We're grateful that the research continues but we felt led to great expectations and ended up with great disappointments.

Time upon time again, there have suggestions and offers of help from the community. There's nodding of heads from the admin and then nothing occurs. At the least, you could have community moderators in the forums. The forums are a mess with no clear line of communications to Jurasicalab. Issues are scattered all over the forum and with no guiding force and lack of clear communications from the admin, it's a hunt to find out what's going on.

There was great hope for improved communications with the intern, but we have to wonder if they were empowered to do their job. It feels like they didn't have the power and/or were not provided with the information needed. I don't want to speak ill though especially as they head to hopefully new opportunities.

It's all very disheartening we think our systems are contributing to research that will make a positive difference but then work is missing, failing, not getting returned, or getting delivered. It doesn't seem like anybody is monitoring things. Doesn't anybody actually run the work themselves on the team and see how things are doing in that aspect? All we see are reactive messages so maybe that assessment is incorrect, but with no PROactive communications.

If you had some volunteers with a line to the teams behind the scenes, they could take up the burden. We are all a little mystified why you won't take advantage of that opportunity. As noted, many BOINC projects have volunteer moderators who have become quite knowledgeable about the projects and can stave off at least the common if not a good portion of the more uncommon questions and issues. SETI@home, the mother project survived on them for decades.

I suspect that many who haven't left are like me in that the only thing keeping them around is the opportunity to choose the research to contribute to. At best, you can set a preference for a research at other projects, but there's no guarantee you will get that research for your systems to work on.

There's such an amazing opportunity to grow the community here but people feel alienated. The same issues seem to continue to crop on and the response all seems reactive...

My two pence worth of thoughts...

Yavanius

There was a time when WCG had Community Advisors. They did provide some behind the scenes information and had some limited access to some information not available to the average volunteer. I always found them to be quite knowledgeable and up to date in their information. For whatever reason they were phased out at some point. The only one I can recall is David Autumns, but he only posts now very sporadically if at all. If he is still around, he may be able to shed more light on this subject.
Cheers
Edit:spelling

It looks like they are sinking the ship.

@Grumpy Swede, Folding@home has a lot of GPU work, if that is your priority. They have very good medically-related projects and publish papers fairly frequently.

Hi Yavanius,

Thank you for your dedication to WCG and your commitment to scientific research for the betterment of humanity.

The team is aware of the previous existence of community moderators for forums, and we understand that volunteers may have a desire to get involved with communications. We appreciate your input; however, we have found that having moderators from our communications team is currently the most effective way to maintain consistent communication between the WCG team and volunteers. We do realize that our temporary communications team is not an ideal state and we continue to work at fundraising and grant applications to bring some stability to this critical position.

Our team does its best with limited resources to investigate and resolve issues as they arise and to provide prompt updates for volunteers. We understand that technical issues can cause frustration and we appreciate your patience, as investigating and resolving these matters takes time. Our current technical staff is handling research and WCG back end and we always try to prioritize critical and essential tasks first, which inevitably sometimes delays our ability to resolve other issues.

TigerLily