Folding Forum

This is posted on behalf of Garo, a member of Ars Technica's Team Egg Roll:

Hi Everyone. Even though I've just registered on this board I am a long time Folding participant who started in 2000 as a member of TER. I post to ask for your assistance on a study of DC volunteers we are doing. We are a couple of academics (computer scientist and sociologist) who are conducting an anonymous survey for an academic book on why people participate in distributed computing projects and how and why participation has changed over the years. We did a short survey in 2005 and the findings were written up in the Journal for Computer Mediated Communication. We appreciate very much you giving up a few minutes of your time to help us document the exciting, valuable and enjoyable experience of participating in distributed computing. The survey is 24 questions with 16 of them being multiple choice.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DistComp

Thank you very much for your help.

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Done.

Done, though it didn't really "fit" DC donors like me. I found out about FAH through the PS3 "Life With Playstation", and there wasn't a listing for that.
We already had social group that involves motorsports, so we started up an FAH team on our "non-DC" forum website.
And since I own a small business, I'm incorporating DC/FAH capability into new computer builds for the shop.

I fit into the oldest age range of the survey, so perhaps like many others in this range, I have watched the creation and development of the personal computer since the beginning.

One thing I've noticed is the recent (everything is relative) growth of the Computer Social Groups. I see the DC/FAH as a natural extension of this. You might think of Farmville as either a CSG or a DC Group.

Millions of gigaflops are being used as we speak to create virtual "worlds" of people for entertainment purposes. Even Wikipedia could perhaps be thought of as a DC project.

For projects like FAH to expand, they will need to incorporate some of the same techniques that entertainment-based CSG's use to draw new clients. There is certainly both a science and an art to the development of mass networks of volunteer clients, and this aspect of DC will perhaps be the next big social science field. Someone who is educated in the techniques of developing and analyzing CSG's will be among the highest paid IT professionals.

done

Pretty easy to tell which questions came from the sociologist, and which ones came from the IT guy....

Good luck with your survey / research. Too often the social engineering aspect of keeping folks engaged with a DC project is either ignored all together, or placed extemely low on the priority list. The better informed we are on the human components of the DC process, the easier it'll be to keep the data flowing.

The comment above is by no means an attempt to take a poke at DC management.... It's simply human nature that the scientists are going to be strongly focussed on getting/interpreting the data, and that the IT folks are going to be focussed on keeping the servers on-line, writing the code, and getting that data into a format that the researchers will be able to sort through. Unfortunately, with these priorities being front and center, what often gets missed is the human element at the client end of the equation. Keeping them happy, informed, and engaged is (IMO) just as important to the success of a DC project as any of the priorities I've already listed.