An Opinion on the State of Free-DC
I've been in the forums a bit the last few days and something kind of sad has occured to me. It just doesn't seem quite the same as it did in the beginning.
Now, keep in mind that everything I'm about to say is just my opinion and doesn't mean squat around here. It's says Administrator under my name and some of you might know that I was one of the founders, but Free-DC was meant to belong to the community from the very beginning so whatever I might think about 'the state' of Free-DC carries exactly as much weight as what any other single member thinks. I'm just going to put a few thoughts out there to see if anyone else feels the same way.
When we founded it, Free-DC was a group of guys who (more or less) were all interested in the same couple of projects. One of our goals, however, was to make Free-DC a place where anyone could work on whatever they wanted to without any stipulations by the rest of the team about what project was 'most' important, or who was being useful to the team or not. I'd say we've succeeded admirably in that respect. I doubt any other team has more projects available for it's members to participate in under their flag.
Unfortunately, I think we've paid a price for that freedom, or rather, our implementation of it. I've been out of touch for awhile, so coming back into the forums gives me kind of a newbie, outside perspective that I didn't have before and you know what? I think we've lost our way a bit. As an outsider coming in, these forums are bewildering and seem painfully stagnant. Allow me to explain...
I pop in one afternoon after deciding that I want to get some machines running DC again. For me, being part of a team and enjoying the company and competition with my fellow members was always the most important part of the equation. The goal of the project I was crunching on was important, but secondary to my desire to have fun with my teammates.
With that in mind, I started looking through the forums to try to find something to crunch. Unfortunately, we now have a bewildering array of forums and subforums. Some have a post or two, some have more, but it's very difficult to get an 'overall sense' of what Free-DC members are doing just by coming to the forums. The projects are so segmented away from each other, that even if I did choose one to jump in, I'd probably never get the time to go through each of the other forums every day to see if I was missing something good brewing elsewhere on the site.
This place has begun to feel like a village without a center for people to congregate in. Everyone has split into little groups and gone off to meet in a different house to do their own thing leaving new arrivals to stand in an empty village and wonder where everyone is. I think we've lost something that was important to our community.
Now, to people who spend a lot of time here, things may not look like this at all. Still, keep in mind that one of the great things about DC is getting new people involved. That makes the 'newbie perspective' somewhat important.
I would never suggest that we limit the number of projects that we compete in, nor would I suggest that Free-DC have an 'official' project. I would, however, suggest that we make some structural changes to our fourms. I think we've got way too many.
Back when I was at Ars Technica with the other Free-DC founders, we started using a technique to allow multiple projects to exist in a single forum (which was all Ars Technica had alloted for Distributed Computing): posts that were specific to a project were given a prefix. For example, 'Team Egg Roll' was the name of Ars Technica's Folding@Home team, so any post specific to Folding@Home had [TER] in front of the title. This made it easy to find posts about the project you were interested in, but still allowed you to see what else was going on without having to dig through lots of other forums and subforums. It also let people see at glance which projects were the most popular for those who were just looking for a project with lots of participation to get engaged in.
I think we have too many projects to just have one big forum with prefixes for each one. Instead, maybe we could combine the existing layers of subforums into just a couple of forums based on the 'type' of project (i.e. biology, math, other) with a sticky post at the top explaining a little about each project, it's prefix and how the prefixes work. I think we should also whittle down the non-project forums into just the Lounge forum. I think a couple of forums with lots of activity are far better than a bunch with just the occasional post.
It sure would be nice to just hop in, glance through one or two project forums and then go hang out in the Lounge for a bit. But then, like everything else in this post, that's just my opinion. ;)
