Folding Forum

I've raised this subject before but usually hidden away inside another thread with little to no response.

I want to do a bit of open brainstorming on recruiting methods for folding@home... please feel free to share what has [or hasn't] worked for you in the past.

Social Networking:
-Facebook "Causes"
If you're on facebook they have an application called causes which allows you to show your support for various charitable causes, there are at least 3 different folding@home causes on there so I'm not sure which if any of them is the "official" folding@home but it probably doesn't matter, so long as the word is getting out there.
Not sure what the other social networks allow you to do in order to support folding@home or spread the word but I'd imagine there are a few different avenues you could use.

Real-world Advertisements?
This one is particularly important to me, are there any objections by the Pande Group to people advertising about folding@home in the real world? Has anyone thought about doing any such advertising before and does anyone have suggestions on what might be eyecatching in terms of graphics and statistics to use on say a poster or something for a University campus?

Competitions
Like the PNY folding@home competition recently... although due to the prevalence of folding farmers [which, whilst being valuable to the science, lower any possibility of a general user "winning" these competitions] I kind of think these competitions should aimed at growing the user base, like referral rewards.


Any suggestions are welcome.

Someone already mentioned real-world advertisements (I forget where) and Vijay Pande said that the problem is that the copyrights to the F@H logos are owned by Stanford University rather than by the Pande Group, which makes it a minefield to get permission to use them. It's certainly worth a shot, but whoever does try has a big task ahead of them (or so VP says).

Also for competitions, I agree that they should be aimed at referrals... competitions for points run the risk of getting people who already run the clients to just temporarily switch teams, which achieves nothing for increasing the project size.

I think you need to work out the referral part, it's 'interesting' to say the least but I think you can make it more interesting if you try to come up with a possible implementation

John, that's a curious issue... as far as using a copyrighted image, surely once you have an "end product" [and assuming you intend to place it where you have permission to do so] it should be a fairly simple process to submit it to Stanford and get them to OK it? People usually only have an issue with using trademarks/copyrighted images if the person using them is making money, or slighting the name of the owners in some way.


I guess then, the question is, what exactly is and isnt copyrighted or trademarked and who would one need to cite these trademarked and copyrighted images to?



@Mtm:
Hey i just try to collate ideas... I dont put them to work lol.

Referral systems are fairly common on the interwebz no point in reinventing the wheel is there?

Well for instance, how long would a new donor have to fold under a specific name or for a specific team to be count as valid for the referer? The same as with the points per day issue, you will get people who want to gain referalls and ask their friends to temporary switch over. It's a known issue with referral systems I know, but I'm curieus in how you would like it to be worked out for Folding@Home. It's not reinventing the wheel, there hasn't been a f@h referral system inplace before so how can it be reinvented

About the trademarks, in a program I wrote a long time ago I used the icon's from the folding clients ( it was a tray it application but totally oriented to folding at home offering right click menu acces to start/stop/show mimicing the systemtray clients ) and I was told I wasn't allowed to use those. So, now I had to make my own icon's for my current project.

The reason I did not get permision I believe ( been awhile, bad memory ) was that my application was a 3rd party application and the icon could confuse people to think it was an official/affiliated release. I think they where indeed abit resitant in fear of my application being able to cause them publicity problems if it would turn out to be problematic in behaviour.

As far as I'm concerned there should be a way of tracking referrals to the project... tracking who you've referred to a team is relatively simple and can be done on the user's end but like you say, its easy to "fake".

The passkey would be a good place to start in terms of keeping track of who referred you or who you have referred.



Your example of the trademark/copyright issues makes a lot of sense... it's very hard to support third party programs because it gives the third party some credibility using your name and if something goes wrong its egg on your face as well as the third party
This can be easily controlled in terms of advertising one would have thought... the "approval" only applies to the particular poster/banner/advert and any changes [no matter how minute] would have to be re-submitted.

You still need a time limit on how long a new donor has to fold under an account to be valid for a referral increase of the person in question. But once you set that, it's indeed capable of tracking everything needed.

The copyright issue is as you say, for advertisement it would be on a per subject basis, and as such shouldn't be problematic but maybe you should directly ask VP about it as he is the one who can shed the most daylight on the topic.

In terms of time limits... I think 1 week should be reasonable so, for CPU clients ~4WUs//1000+ points.

After a week... retention is what we need to address but that is a far more difficult topic, far easier to come up with education systems for recruiting [not just advertising or direct referrals but education on the website/faq].

I don't thing we want referrals to be team-based. Anybody can switch teams and they shouldn't be able to count themselves as a new referral. It almost has to be based on Passkey.

I can switch to a different username using the same passkey and as long as my personal stats don't follow me, those who do care about their personal stats are unlikely to do this. Once stats can be accumulated by passkey without respecting UserName, things may change.