Hello fellow crunchers,
I joined to help change the world, help mankind. Using boinc only for WCG. Big factor was (as someone above said) results will be published, not sold.
I have recruited almost 25 people.

I was at a blood drive last week, after the drawing I was talking to some really nice old people at the snack table, I managed to recruit 2 more members. I also managed to convince 2 of my friends to show up for the blood drive. The greatest look on the nurses face when she says "you're sixteen and this is your third time donating?"

I originally started with grid-computing in the late 90's, in University, first with distributed.net in its earlier days and then moved onto SETI@Home, and then onto United Devices' cancer-research project as I thought medical research would be more helpful. After a while, when that project started to dwindle a bit, I moved back on to distributed.net and eventually my interest in grid-computing dropped to zero and I didn't bother any more after I graduated from Uni in 2000.

It was only when my Nan became very ill and was stuck in a hospice, just under 3 years ago, that grid-computing popped back into my mind and, from there, I easily found BOINC and WCG. Over the time, I've had access to various bits and pieces of test-kit through work and WCG's been perfect for stress-testing them, as and when required. More recently, have rented a 24-thread dedicated server and will likely be keeping that running 24/7 for the foreseeable future.

On the grounds of recruiting others, I've had some joy in getting friends/colleagues to briefly give it a go, but I guess they don't see the long-term appeal as they tend to let their efforts drop after a while and don't bother continuing to help out.

I think it is a little bit magical that something we can buy in the high street can connect up to a facility that allows scientists cure diseases and solve other complex problems. Can't think of anything else in my house that gets anywhere near that level of fantastic-ness.

I have been doing this since UD and this year I had to retire 2 old PCs in the summer that between then managed to send in over 3000 results to WCG. When I turned them off for the last time, I actually thanked them.

I have 2 i7's running now and in the last few months they have nearly caught up with the 2 old PCs that had been running for years.

I originally joined BOINC to run SETI back in 2010, but stopped after a while since I wasn't sure if it was worth the power costs and emissions. Last year I finally got a power meter so I could calculate the actual costs of doing this. For the emissions problem; unfortunately I can't run the computers on solar being in an apartment and all, but I found that I could buy renewable energy credits to at least be able to claim that it's clean energy - currently I use 100% wind credits from Arcadia, which are still pretty cheap; a couple bucks per month per computer. With that taken care of I've been crunching 24/7 since November.

The reason I do this is because I would like to know that I'm doing at least some good. I also donate money to various environmental organizations, but it's not much, making close to minimum wage. It's also pretty unrewarding, pouring your hard-earned money into a bottomless pit and hoping it does some good. So I decided to put more focus on donating computer time instead of money since it uses a skill I already have - building fast computers to play PC games. So far I've overclocked my gaming computer and stuck a massive heatsink on it to improve it's crunching power, and built a new Linux computer with a 4ghz AMD Vishera 8-core as a dedicated cruncher.

Currently I'm running all of the WCG projects with emphasis on CEP since environmentalism is more my thing, and I also run a lot of ClimatePrediction.net on the other computer since they have a ton of Linux workunits in queue, and I've noticed scientists mention in some books on climate change and in the IPCC reports that computing power is a limitation, and always seem to be calling for more modeling.
Once I can get some fast internet I'm going to start running the Tor relay again, and I also do a lot of Zooniverse projects.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to recruit anyone. Nobody seems to build computers much anymore, and everyone here seems to have the "I'll be dead by then" attitude.

Long Live WCG.