Originally posted by brage
I think that people who hear about the opportunity to contribute to science, folding protein, searching for radio signals from outer space, or what ever, do care about the progress the projects are making. After all we hear about the project, decide to join, download the program, install it and run it for hundreds and hopefully thousands of hours. And it's a fact that most people run the screensaver version (at lest that goes for SETI and probably also DF). I think the reason for that is so that they can monitor the progress and brag about the screensaver to friends and so on. But after a while you get used to the screensaver, and you have told all of your friends, and most people start wondering: "what happens with the work I contribute". Is there a reason for me to do this, other than a cool screensaver? This is when a good project never leaves the volunteer in doubt. Progress must be documented so that the volunteer feel like doing something useful as well. I do believe that lots of people "install and forget", but I also believe that they are the first to "uninstall and forget".
I think you're wrong here. Provided the client works flawlessly (IE, distributed.net, Seti@Home, etc), if they're of the "fire and forget" mentality, it's exactly that. Install it, forget about it. That's the best kind of client. However, if the client is buggy (countless other DC apps), then they become the "uninstall and forget", as you coined it. I'd be willing to wager that 90%+ of the people that are running DF are running it for the science, but not in the way you think. It's a (possibly) good cause. I know that Howard and Elena are working on the client, the server back-end, the algorithm, and everything else, all the while doing any classwork, teaching, real-lifing that is left over. However, those 90%+ people are here for the stats. They could honestly care less what happens to the data, so long as it's being counted for something. The only way they know it's being counted is if they have statistics to back it up, which leads to your next statement:


Statistics is one way of making it clear that there is a progress, but statistics isn't enough to make people stay with a project for many years.
Wrong. People have stuck with Seti@Home for 5+ years mostly because of the stats. They like seeing their name in the lights, so to speak. It also helps that the client is stable, and there's lots of 3rd party add-ons.

Personal contact with the people who run the project would be very bonding, but requires too much work. A project that want to grow large (and by large I mean 100.000+ cpus) has to give response to it's volunteers.
Who says? Seti@Home has several hundred thousand users, and has almost never given response to its users.

DistributedFolding now has approximately 30.000 registered users, and 1454 active users. This is nothing! Something has to be done to make people stay. DF has statistics, a good client with a really cool screensaver and a good forum but is lacking big time in response from developers. Participating in DF feels like contributing to statistics and no one is telling you anything else. I am about to quit the project; it feels like throwing cpu cycles into a black hole. It probably is more useful than that, but the result page is not convincing me otherwise, on the contrary, it strengthens my feeling with some old mediocre CASP results. I want a reason to believe in DF. I am not giving away cpu-time to anyone. There are lots of other useful projects that document their progress, but then again they don't have that cool screensaver... but in the long run, screensavers doesn't matter, only the feeling of doing something useful.
I bet if you ask the developers (who are never here, as you say), what is actually going on, they'd tell you. There's a reason they don't have "roadmap" of what's going to happen: they don't know. Once they get the back-end stable, and the client working the way they want, maybe they'll have a better plan as to where they want to go. This project is still in it's infancy. It took Seti@Home 4+ years on a 2 year project to get the way they are (roadmap-wise), and they aren't even following it!


And by the way, the CASP5 results were extremely promising for at least one reason, but one main reason I can think of: 2 developers, in their "spare" time, came up with a client and an algorithm that produced meaningful results. They might not have been the best results, but they were meaningful. They showed that this project is a serious contender in the protein folding world, and that it has lots of potential.

dp out.