What are the volunteer issues?

• user motivation
  • interested in science
  • VC as a game: stats, etc
  • general altrusim
• retention levels for various groups/motivations?
  • esp in context of multi-project services

• treat each user category separately?
  • different services/types of services for each group
    • science types: need forums, techie
  • or: can they be combined synergistically?
    • trickle down summaries of science
    • tech support

• stats: mark's market research
  • % of people who would take action in support of charity much larger than % of people who would take action in support of science?

• relative merits of single-app projects vs multi-app aggregators like WCG, ibercivis, etc.
  • absence of science discussions in multi-app projects
  • do people know what they are doing?
    • retention?

• it's not all free
  • volunteers are not working for free: they get paid in "results" -- scientific results, stats, social factors.
  • everything is financed: distribution of financing in volunteer computing
  • outreach: think of it as a grant application, submitted to tens of thousands of reviewers

what is the value to project scientists of the user community

• additional labor (distributed thinking)
• value of outreach: public education (ex malaria awareness)

what to do

• science
  • more news
  • more involvement, more to do (distributed thinking)
  • more science info (BG info)
  • scientific "translation" service

• altrusim
  • get grant to do good popsci writing about projects
  • proper PR
    • when getting a grant, should be required to get funding to allocate resources to writing PR
    • this should be a requirement of funding agencies
  • poss. adt'l involvement, depending on details
  • social status (badges) rather than credits (ie, different incentive system)

• stats/gaming crowd
  • self organized: teams, etc.
    • push info into those groups (news, etc)
    • just feed them credits
  • good model: communities of shared interests
    • what are the causes sufficient to motivate action?
    • organize communities around these

• bundle PR/outreach plan w. BOINC software
  • best practices

but: insufficient resources to implement, so:

community of communicators
-- social middleware -- every BOINC project is a distributed thinking project designed to produce new users --

• writing, PR
  • just ask -- there are people to do this.
  • seek professionals in misc domains

social middleware

• credit for new recruitment of volunteers (rather than new credits) [badges: social status]
• credit for translations [badges]

motivations

• financial reward
• social status
• intellectual interest / learning
• altruism