Also making sure that the outcome of the discussions are correctly recorded, and actions properly placed....

Hi there, long time user, first time caller. I have been a Gridcoin participant since 2013/2014 and am beyond excited for all the upgrades coming to both Gridcoin and BOINC. I have some input I'd like to share.

First, I want to explain why Gridcoin is not something that should be feared by the BOINC community. Please do not take it as an advertisement. I simply feel there is a lot of hesitation regarding using Gridcoin with BOINC and would like to address that hesitation.

WHAT IS GRIDCOIN

Gridcoin is a transparent, decentralized community which has developed a blockchain based incentive and reward structure for distributed processing via BOINC.

Gridcoin developed a Distributed Proof of Research protocol (DPoR), also known as Proof of BOINC (PoB). DPoR rewards those contributing their processing power to BOINC projects with GRC. This uses a decentralized currency to incentivize the decentralized processing of the troves of data collected and created every day -- from scientific, to mathematics, to social, to political.

It encourages the creation of more BOINC projects. It encourages investment in processing hardware. It encourages the expansion of BOINC itself. Gridcoin is a good thing for BOINC, and we need input from users who are against it so we can make it the best it can be because like it or not, we're not going anywhere.

SOCIAL MEDIA

In terms of adding social media to the BOINC client in the way described by CM, I believe that this will do far more harm than good. Social media, while at one time useful, is now commonly known as an echo-chamber. It does nothing but verify a user's own beliefs. It also does nothing to produce meaningful interactions. Just look around at the quantity of content on redd/steem-it (or Facebook, if you dare) and look for good quality. It is rare.

Telegram in particular is destructive (a troll box) unless it is a closed channel where only admins can speak -- but this isn't social media anymore, it's a media outlet.

SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Instead of using social media, I propose that a Social Infrastructure be built into BOINC.

For inspiration and example, I will look at three programs which people already leave running all day:

Steem/Reddit
Spotify
Blizzard

The entities behind these programs developed in client identifying, messaging, and interaction UX infrastructures which have been critical to the success of their product.

Steem/reddit, while difficult to sort through in general, allows users to post and follow content which is judged by the community and voted on by each individual: What if BOINC had a semi-regulated process for submitting content to a BOINC home page? This content would then be "upvoted" or "downvoted" by the community. I envision this infrastructure as making visible content from project leaders and very active community members.

Spotify can make playlists -- What if BOINC had some sort of playlist with the aggregated stats of the projects a user is working on? That data could then be shared with friends,family, or made public. Spotify also lets users "follow" those they deem worth following. What if BOINC did the same? -- A user is notified if someone they follow posts an article, shares a project they're working on, shares hardware info, etc.

Blizzard lets you form parties, clans, make favorite users -- What if BOINC let users make and dismantle teams with ease? What if BOINC let users favorite those who do spread quality information?

Overall, I think the best improvement would be a switch from inter-team competition to inter-user competition -- something similar to Blizzard, Steam, and most other wildly successful games: You "level up" as a user instead of competing for RAC among teams. This mitigates the "Mob Mentality" of team sports while still encouraging the formation of teams to complete objectives.

Which brings me to my last suggestion: instead of team competitions, what if BOINC ran simple objectives, much like most successful games that already exist? These objectives could be completed as a single user, but are easier to complete if you join a team or a party. After the completion of the objective, a user either leaves the team or party, stays in the team or party, or leaves the team or party but has made some new friends from the endeavor.

Finally, I think it is important to recognize that BOINC is currently a platform of enthusiasts. Look at the number of people signed up vs. the number of active participants. The gap between those numbers means that average users get BOINC set up and find it too much of a hassle to continue using. If we want to change this, something like this TBD project is required. Once we begin to retain non-enthusiasts, the overall atmosphere of BOINC is going to change. The space for enthusiasts will never go away, but overall, enthusiasts will become the honored minority. This seems to be inevitable. Each of us has to choose how we are going to react to the coming change. Personally, I can't wait and would love to help in any way I can.

Anyone, please feel free to reach out to me to challenge these ideas or to discuss other ideas you are considering.

Thank you for taking the time!

-j

Also making sure that the outcome of the discussions are correctly recorded, and actions properly placed....

Our secretary (minute taker) is remarkably efficient, making written minutes available online within an hour of the end of the meeting. Even I can remember if they're accurate for about that long...

A litlle note: update the copyright in Boinc Manager, now is "(C) 2003-2015" with 7.6.33 version.

v7.6.33 was released over a year ago - OK, in 2016 (5 Jun 2016), so your point is valid.

But more than the copyright notice needs updating...

Indeed, it's only a little note..... :-)

I see, also, Marius Millea from Cosmology@Home, organizer of Boinc Meeting.

Marius is not a member of the BOINC Work Group,

It's a pity, with his knowledge of Docker....
Uh, now i see the VERY little participation of admins of biological/medical/chemical/etc projects (like Rosetta, Denis, Gpugrid and others).

Also making sure that the outcome of the discussions are correctly recorded, and actions properly placed....

Our secretary (minute taker) is remarkably efficient, making written minutes available online within an hour of the end of the meeting. Even I can remember if they're accurate for about that long...

Can you provide a link please?

Also making sure that the outcome of the discussions are correctly recorded, and actions properly placed....

Our secretary (minute taker) is remarkably efficient, making written minutes available online within an hour of the end of the meeting. Even I can remember if they're accurate for about that long...

Can you provide a link please?

Sorry, not without authority from the group itself. I'll ask.

Remembered another potential BOINC improvement last night:

If we were able to benchmark attainable RAC with the user's computer (through a project specific benchmark perhaps) then they would be able to work out how much GRC they could earn ahead of crunching (currently you need to crunch for weeks before figuring this out), this could help users make a more educated project selection.

Likewise, on the topic of RAC - there was a large thread on a possible '4th gen credit mechanism' which attracted a lot of attention last year: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10953 It would be excellent if further research/discussion was held on an improved credit mechanism.

Best regards,
CM.

1. I don't find the Disk and Statistics much use, I find that the statists are better servered on the website like boincstats etc. I always use the advanced view. BoincTasks is super valuable tool. the concepts of jobs, tasks, wu's are hard to configure on these virtualbox projects. I still have strange effects like some settings cause my PC to run 1 task when I set to unlimited for example. I think this is becasuse it too hard for the admins to make correct configurations. The projects like this are beyond a normal user to setup. I don't critise this help as its excellent but a avergae person wouldn't have a clue what to do.

https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4161#29359

editing client_state.xml etc...
Boinc knows the specs of your PC so it could help you?

I like davids concept that you would optin to an area of science, this makes it more likly that people would join projects as now you have to discover them so how. Currently project are optin mabybe optout would be better, athough maybe an invasion, athough you optin to BOINC

I it would be nice if BOINC could post to socialmedia that I achived something for science, found new prime or computed a low energy confimation.

Since we give our resources to the projects I have to wonder what is the return, from davids comments it seems like the main users are people that liek to tinker with computer so they do it for those reasons. Gridcon maybe to make money. I imagine for many people these aren't such motivating reasons.

2. I'm not sure what I could do?

I have to wonder what is the return

For the group, I've pointed out

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects

which is understated and outdated. But would something like that, perhaps with a paragraph from the abstract of each paper, count as a return?

Better late than never:

My main point on how to make BOINC better would be the big field of improving communication. If bug reports and feature requests are submitted at the wrong place or not at all, nothing will change, so we users should be more verbous. On the other hand, it might be a good idea if BOINC would do more to encourage feedback. The bug report instructions are a bit hidden and it might be better to discuss feature requests only on one platform, not on three platforms in parallel. There was a survey long time ago, maybe it's time for another one.

So, thanks for creating this thread here and on various project message boards. An additional news item pointing to this thread would have been great, but it's better than discussing with just a few invited participants in some backroom.

Another point: While finding new ways to attract more participants is definitely important, the existing user base should also be kept happy. In another thread, I mentioned a few points how BOINC could be improved in order to prepare it for one of the proposed new ways while also adding something useful for the existing user base. If a new idea, however, requires notable changes without improving something for the existing users, it might not be a good idea, especially if it touches polarizing topics:

Imagine a political party promised that they would run BOINC on all government computers and create a foundation specifically to support BOINC projects, if they had the power. They might beg that BOINC officially endorses them and adds a checkbox to the user preferences so that a user can show that he supports the party, which might later be used to identify users who are entitled to decide which projects the government computers should run. The set&forget users would probably not notice anything because they never visit the project websites, let alone the message boards, but such a move would severely alienate those enthusiasts who loathe the party because of other platform points or believe that BOINC should always remain non-partisan. This could well lead to civil-war-like discussions on the message boards of the projects and various related communities and cause the enthusiasts to lose their enthusiasm or quit BOINC altogether. In the end, the party might not be able to keep its promise, either, and only the set&forget users who tend to forget to install BOINC after buying a new computer are left. So the much better solution would be that BOINC remains neutral, while the party can still deliver on their promise even without an endorsement (and they can certainly find other formats for their campaign than relying on BOINC doing their job).

For the group, I've pointed out

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects

which is understated and outdated. But would something like that, perhaps with a paragraph from the abstract of each paper, count as a return?

That would be great. And if the projects had standardized publication lists on their websites, a global list of BOINC-based publications could be generated without someone having to keep track of all project announcements.

---

I'd contribute as a developer, but I can develop only in C#. Plus, there are a lot of directories and unused 10-12 year old check-in notes, and God knows what else, that makes the GitHub repo a mess. At least to me.

The decision making, development and release management very slow. E.g. brevilo tried to handle the Android release management, but nothing changed so far and months are passed. https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/1846

The auto update feature why a security risk and how can FireFox and Chrome handle it? Isn't any best practice?

A guy developed a very cool new Boinc manager from scratch called the BoincTasks. I think it would be very helpful to merge the two projects and develop only one manager in the future. https://efmer.com/boinctasks/

The Folding@Home and the Boinc basically the same. Why the two projects don't merge? The two "team" basically develop the "same" app.

Registering and connecting to a project as a new user is cumbersome. The registration should be much more easily, like connect with Facebook.

Also making sure that the outcome of the discussions are correctly recorded, and actions properly placed....

Our secretary (minute taker) is remarkably efficient, making written minutes available online within an hour of the end of the meeting. Even I can remember if they're accurate for about that long...

Can you provide a link please?

Sorry, not without authority from the group itself. I'll ask.

Hey, any luck getting authority on this?

I'm specifically interested on the formation/consensus of PMC's policy regarding virtual currency related code within BOINC: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/pull/2009#issuecomment-320142414

Cheers

The decision of the working group is not to make internal working documents (including minutes) available at this stage.

We are a long way from considering individual pull requests at this stage - we are a working group, not the PMC. Our role is to provide advice on how decisions are made in the future, not to make those decisions ourselves or review previous decisions. And believe me, that's tough enough already.

The decision of the working group is not to make internal working documents (including minutes) available at this stage.

We are a long way from considering individual pull requests at this stage - we are a working group, not the PMC. Our role is to provide advice on how decisions are made in the future, not to make those decisions ourselves or review previous decisions. And believe me, that's tough enough already.

Ah, I got the 'working group' and PMC mixed up in this thread, still though a lack of transparency is disappointing.

..still though a lack of transparency is disappointing.

Most all information will become available when we're done. It's not that it's so super secret what we're doing, but a lot of what we come up with and what's in the agenda and minutes, may not even make it into the end result. Just making sure we're not giving all kinds of false hope.

I'm also a long time user and seldom come onto the forums unless I'm searching for info. I've always loved the concept of volunteer distributed computing as a cost effective way of getting scientific data processed.

I love science and the opportunity to help solve scientific problems with my computations is my hobby. However my hobby has got more expensive, as time has gone by, with equipment and electricity costs being the major stumbling block for me. Then I discovered that I could continue with my favorite projects and defray my expenses by joining the Gridcoin Community.
Win,win, for me and I discovered that the community is great!! Very fair, transparent and innovative.

Since starting with the Gridcoin Community I have noticed the animosity between some BOINC members and the Gridcoin Community.
However, we are so alike in every way. It's just that I use all the resources available to ensure I continue with my hobby without putting too much of a strain on my personal finances. I also get the bonus of learning, with others, how the blockchain and digital currency works. Fascinating!!

I'm inclined to agree with jringo about the addition of social media to the BOINC client. This addition would bring no positive influence, in my opinion and will only serve to water down the ethos of the BOINC community. I personally don't need a BOINC client which seconds as another social media portal.

Modernizing the BOINC client's GUI to make it look more up to date in advanced view might be welcomed. As has been said in here, I also do not use the statistics and seldom use the disk tab. Perhaps something more useful could be found in place of those functions.

Mercosity ..

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects

which is understated and outdated. But would something like that, perhaps with a paragraph from the abstract of each paper, count as a return?

http://www.boincitaly.org/progetti/pubblicazioni-scientifiche.html#en

I once wondered whether there was a way boinc (when communicating with a project's servers) would be able to prioritise tasks on an intermediate level (below those requiring high priority) - by detecting, then allowing tasks already reported (by a wingmate) to start and finish before others in the same download that had not yet reported.

Then I wondered whether it would make things better or worse for the projects, or us, or both (either way one way or the other or the same way) maybe also RAC, and couldn't decide. So I stopped thinking about it.

Soothing, faint sound effects might be nice, or chimes or something as tasks progress when the computer is not in use for other things. During the night when we can't sleep, we might appreciate it quite a lot :) In terms of future-proofing - mood detection software that can relay little warning pictures from boinc manager (like storm clouds, or a Yuuzhan Vong icon or something) to our user info on the project webpages, for while we're posting. And the response icons that feed back could then be combined into a rage index or something that can then trigger a page colour change in boinc for instance.

That's all I can think of for now.

..still though a lack of transparency is disappointing.

Most all information will become available when we're done. It's not that it's so super secret what we're doing, but a lot of what we come up with and what's in the agenda and minutes, may not even make it into the end result. Just making sure we're not giving all kinds of false hope.

Transparency is very important i feel for an Open Source project.

Raising hopes is engagement! False hopes occur when expectations are raised which are not delivered, and lack of information is a "non-delivery".

I also hoped for more openness.