Welcome to new member Jingcheng Wu

[NookieBandit]

1. Exactly the reason why having someone responsible for Donor Communications to explain just why the DAB has not met, or better, when the next meeting is and the agenda. The point is to Communicate with donors about the major issues being discussed, and where appropriate and as determined by the DAB, conduct polls and obtain feedback from the general donor community to obtain early feedback from those that care to comment. The person responsible for donor communications should be the focal point for the summary response from the DAB to the donor community.

2. Correct - donors come and go all the time, but the point of this project and the stated objective of Dr. Pande is to retain as many donors as possible. One of the reasons donors leave is due to the extra heat generated and the stress put on A/C systems in the summer. A simple database search of those donors that tend to be seasonal with a corresponding email sent to them in the Fall reminding them that FAH needs their help, along with it being a good way to supplement heating your house/condo/apt/dorm room would be a way to continue to pull seasonal folders back into donating. Donor Communications would be responsible for that program. Given this is a world-wide effort, the program also applies to our Southern hemisphere brethren in seasonal reverse. A small marketing effort by Donor Communications to broaden interest through social media of the successes FAH has had would also help. My point could have been better phrased as, "Recruiting and retaining donors".

3. I'm glad you know of no hardware changes PG plans to make. Frankly, great news. No histrionics on the horizon for any SMP CPU core adjustments or decrementing certain GPU cards is nice to know. Again, that's exactly the point of communicating where PG stands on changing (or not) any hardware requirements for certain work units.

4. My point didn't specifically reference hardware, so "See #3" doesn't directly apply. The more general point was that changes in points, bonus points, the point system itself, soliciting ideas for other ways to improve FAH (like getting smaller work units for lower-end hardware or hardware that's not on 24x7) all constitute a change in one form or another. Virtually all of the posts on this site from those that have been around awhile demonstrate passion as well as being reasoned, logical thinkers. That being the case, a simple, thoughtful explanation of changes being made would go a very long way to soothing Donor angst by treating them as partners in the FAH mission. With that type of explanation, the level of consternation is likely to be less and everyone can see the tradeoffs made in the best interest of FAH. I hesitate to throw too many colloquialisms around, but the way it feels now is like a CEO I used to work for who used to say repeatedly, "This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship. I'm the dick and you're the taters". That kind of attitude doesn't go very far in terms of motivating employees, and even worse with donors. The donor communications position's responsibility in this case would be to take the time to post a thoughtful long-form piece on the changes made and why.

5. The beta forum addresses software that gets let out into the wild on a limited basis, not the new features and functions of FAHClient, FAHControl, web control and any possible APIs and reporting tools that should be product roadmap items in a project like this. There is a list bug list, but that's not on-point with what I think would be an exciting set of features that donors could look forward to. Doing so provides hope. Hope in the form of new functionality (AVX?) that continues to keep donors interested in the future, in the new science that gets unlocked and their participation on the leading-edge of being a partner with PG in achieving that goal. A simple statement from the Donor Communications person like, "PG is currently working through an estimation of how much additional science can be produced if we took advantage of newer CPU functions like AVX. Looking at our pool of donors, they think we can now tackle ________ projects that until now were not possible using older CPU instructions. Based on our current estimations, that would advance the potential for scientific understanding _____ times what we can do today". Now, the current state-of-mind that you, 7im reflect, is that such a statement would cause a maelstrom of posts and email asking when it will be available and that would be deemed a distracting and unnecessary provocation of the donor community. On the other hand, it's actually an opportunity. There are many of us that have the financial resources to provide a donation to PG to develop that functionality. Seeing what's on the product roadmap that can't be completed due to resources in the form of development staff and $ is simply one more challenge that donors could be asked to help solve beyond crunching work units.

6. I did not realize some of the code was on Github, so that is my mistake. Is there also a call for specific software development talent to create the functionality that PG would like to achieve?

7. My first post in November 2012 was suggesting:
A. A roadmap with software releases that pertain to hardware enablement, optimization and decremented/end-of-life for aging or non-supported platforms. The point was to help donors understand what hardware investments would be logical to make over the coming quarters (related to #5).
B. For all FAH-dependent software, such as drivers, operating systems and development environments, PG should provide a quarterly update of all non-NDA information that consolidates the progress, or lack thereof, of these supporting software systems in the advancement of the FAH software roadmap. With this information, donors would have additional information to make purchase decisions, but most importantly can apply pressure to those organizations falling behind in the development of tools and environments needed for F@H to advance. A few hundred voices could do a lot to get Nvidia and AMD moving on specific features relevant to FAH (i.e. Nvidia OpenCL 1.2, JIT)
C. Before any work units are released to the general folding public, PG ensures that a wide-enough range of hardware systems have been used to benchmark them to ensure points consistency with the amount of work done, if the intention is to truly move toward “equal work = equal points”. Aside from internal testing, PG should use data obtained from those donors running the Advanced flag to tap a deeper pool of hardware results for verification.

All of the above points demonstrate the partnership with which donors should be viewed by PG, and vice versa. PG provides donors with reasonable "heads up" on hardware used now and in the future for FAH software, while donors can provide help to PG beyond processed work units by pressuring Nvidia and AMD to get their acts together when necessary. The last point was an issue a while back and addressed fairness and equality in the assignment of points.

8. Your implying that "deep science" can't be explained to the mere mortal. I reject that notion in its entirety. Someone that has a biology and journalism background could easily write an informative and understandable summary of the science being done. In my career, I've had to explain tremendously complicated investments to my limited partners, including a couple that utilize Discrete Event Simulation using Markov state models. It isn't always easy, but the use of analogies can go a long way to teasing out the significance of the effort undertaken. Our donor communications representative has the background to write the results of the science in a way that provides motivation to the donor community by keeping them engaged, setting the stage for the next phase of research (if any) and allowing donors to show friends and family why they're involved with FAH, potentially recruiting them as donors. It also addresses the Wife Factor (my apologies to the wives reading this) by getting her support. Many of us consider this a hobby, like golf, but instead of spending $100 a month on greens fees, I'm spending $100 a month in electricity to help solve some of the worlds most basic scientific mysteries that could one day lead to new insights that create cures for some of the most deadly diseases known to man. Pointing her to something she can read to easily get the full context would make the extra monthly expense a non-issue. One more donor saved.

9. I have not seen a "Media Kit" that comprehends the package anyone can download in its entirety - from one place - to use as a recruiting tool for new donors, whether they be individuals or corporations. Typically this would consist of PowerPoint/KeyNote presentations, FAQs, samples of scientific papers published, articles online and in print that point to the critical science FAH is doing, and a cost/benefit analysis of the effort should an entity decide to participate. The kit needs to be updated constantly with new results to keep it fresh and relevant.

10. Again, I may have missed it, but where can I find a sub-group associated with FAH that is dealing with the challenge of developing a system that passes IRS scrutiny for tax deductible electricity expenses as charitable contributions to PG/Stanford? More generally, the point is that no one in any reasonable amount of time find topics they would be willing to help with by searching all the places you mention. For example, where is the list of all the websites that contain team conversations on these topics? How about the Donor Communications representative putting a section together on this website that tracks all of the sub-groups doing things that help FAH? Donors could then easily decide how to participate in a sub-group they find interesting to them.

11. I fully realize that FAH is hardware agnostic. But the reality is there is really not that much different hardware to be agnostic about. We have Intel and AMD for CPUs, and Nvidia and AMD for GPUs. My point was that the Donor Communications rep could simply contact each of the companies I mentioned and ask for a discount code that could be used for purchase of hardware by FAH donors. It may be unrealistic to implement, but we don't know that until its tried, or at least investigated. The quid pro quo is very simple: PG helps get you hardware at a discount and you crank up your electricity bill to get them processed work units. It's back to that partnership concept.

Respectfully disagreeing with you, much of this does fall under the direct or indirect responsibility of JC and/or PG but most importantly, they need to decide to what extent they wish to engage. My point of inquiring about JC's progress in her assessment of donor communications was expressly to determine to what extent she is engaging and what her conclusions are. Many times I enjoy the "classic 7im" response in its terseness and edge-of-condescension, but this time you failed to advance the discussion, which is obviously what I'm seeking to accomplish by my decidedly non-terse response.

[Nathan_P]

DAB has fallen by the wayside, most of the original members are not even active on the team forums anymore

[Grandpa_01]

NookieBandit

I sincerley hope you are not waiting for any of this to happen. It is most likley filed away in the soon to be adressed file. I keep an eye out to see if anything has changed within the F@H orginization or these forums and nothing has, clearley donor retention is on the bottom of the thing soon to do list. I keep seeing post of how many flops are being done but none of how many could have been done if so many had not left. But according to some that would not have made a diffrence. The actual number of donors has been on a steady decline since July of 2013 it is currentley down to around 11,000 in any given 24hr period the last time I checked at Kakao stats. The total number of CPU's was down by almost 50% from July 10, 2013 so how many flops would there be if some of the problems would have been addressed and donor retention would have been improved. I am stil running another project and have increased my core count and output and I will keep watching and waiting for improvement here. But untill I see some my resources will remain in other projects.

10/07/2013, 333059 active CPU's at F@H
01/01/2014, 229995 active CPU's at F@H
05/09/2014, 171137 active CPU's at F@H