BOINC Basics: support for working communities

(Design document - not implemented yet)

This document describes BOINC Basics, an infrastructure for web-based "working communities", i.e. groups of people trying to accomplish something together. Boinc Basics provides mechanisms for user accounts, grouping of users, and communication among users.

BOINC Basics provides a basis for three 'activities':

• BOINC - volunteer computing
• BOSSA - distributed thinking
• BOLT - Web-based learning

A project is an organization that does one or more of these activities, and runs the BOINC Basics software on a server. A project can add activities without requiring new user registration.

Accounts

Users (i.e. people in the working community) create accounts. Each account is identified by an email address and password. Passwords are stored only in a hashed form, reducing security risks.

An account can have the following user-supplied attributes:

• A profile in which the user can provide a picture and text describing themselves, or their interest in the project or activity.
• An avatar - a small image used to represent the user.
• Demographic attributes: birth year, sex, nationality, education level.

An account has the following project-supplied attributes

• A numerical credit, representing the amount of contribution to the project, possibly involving computation, distributed thinking, recruitment of other users, etc. BOINC Basics keeps track of the account's total credit, and its average credit (exponentially smoothed with a 1-week half-life).
• Activity-specific attributes: how well the user has mastered a body of knowledge, their aptitude at various types of tasks, and so on.

Communication mechanisms

Message boards

BOINC Basics provides message boards Message boards consist of 'forums', each one having a particular topic. Each forum consists of a set of 'threads', and each thread consists of a set of 'posts'.

The message board software A project can provide a fixed set of forums.

Private messages

RSS feeds

Possible future mechanisms

• Skype and Skypecast
• IRC or other chat

Groups