Well, I guess it depends on how well known WCG is in the scientific community. My guess is that it's not very well known at all, in which case the staff at WCG and/or IBM needs to make some effort to reach out to the folks and let them know what is available, no?

Believe me, there is no shortage of need for the vast sort of computing power that we have to offer. There's also no shortage of "big data" projects out there, I'm sure.

So if we know the need exists but we still only have 3 projects, then who's fault can that possibly be? Are we really going to blame the researchers for their ignorance or are we going to blame WCG for not making more of an effort to publicize what this community has to offer? Personally I don't think that's a tough question to answer.

Just a brief search produces this post by a one time posting member

https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewpostinthread?post=320273

"First, I want to thank you for contacting me about work units. When I reimaged my system, I forgot to add World Community Grid to my projects. It has been added."

Conclusion, there is a reminder mail for those stopping contribution.

It's nice that an automated email is sent to people who haven't returned any results for some period of time and I give WCG credit for setting that up.

But how does that help with people who have willfully left? People who have just decided for one reason or another that they've had enough of WCG? It doesn't.

Now granted, maybe in a lot of cases there's nothing that WCG can do about this. But do we want to assume our conclusions like some medieval bishop or do we want to actually know what is going on and why? I would like to assume it is the latter.

And the fact of the matter is that we have plenty of volunteers here who would be willing to help. We just need to have the effort coordinated by WCG. All we need from them is someone to send an email to people who have been inactive for some period of time with a link to a questionnaire.

We can get people from the community here to volunteer to compose a brief questionnaire and someone from WCG would just have to approve it. I promise not to volunteer if that would sweeten the deal for the staff. Ideally we would also want to run this by the forum for comments as well.

Then, either than same group or a different group of volunteers would be responsible for collating the answers and coming up with a report. This would relieve the burden on the WCG staff but still give us some insight into what if any problems exist on WCG's end that could be remediated.

There shouldn't be any problems with volunteers handling these duties as we could disclose in the email how the questionnaire would be handled and since it would be anonymous, it should still allow everyone to participate.

You lost me. What is already done? If you are talking about emails being sent out after a period of inactivity, I already acknowledged that. That wasn't the point. If you're talking about something else like notifying people of new projects. That's fine, but that only covers one of an infinite number of possibilities - right?

When I left back in April, my intention was to stay gone until a new project came along to make it interesting again.

To enhance on the point cjslman made about the reporting from the project scientists, I've been contributing to WCG for 10 years and if I stop and look back, I can't put my finger on one thing that I can attribute to helping mankind in any observable way. The closest thing would be the identified compounds from the Childhood Cancer Project or maybe the identified compounds that Dr. Perryman spoke about in his last update. Other than that, nothing. Without a doubt, knowledge has been expanded in some fashion in the fields that we crunched but we don't see those things. As far as we know, the results go into a black hole. Some papers get written, but what's the benefit to mankind. We are doing this on faith that the knowledge gained from our results will lead to something. More communication from the scientists makes everyone feel like we are part of the research team. Scientist and crunchers all working toward the same goal. Clean Energy was going a pretty good job but they have fallen off over the past six months.

Sorry, started rambling....