Folding Forum

By 'they' I really mean us. It's too much to ask for them to be responsible for both sides: Research and Community building.

nchowlett wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 11:52 pm By 'they' I really mean us. It's too much to ask for them to be responsible for both sides: Research and Community building.

Based on your first comment, which I agree with your second comment should read as follows.

"It's too much to ask for US to be responsible for both sides: Research and Community building."

As just my opinion as another folder and forum member that is not affiliated with any "official" folding authority, I think some of the push back seen on this thread is due to parts of "us" wanting instant satisfaction from the other parts of "us" to fix wording on the website or otherwise improve the community.

Once again, I can agree that image and information are important. But I'm not sure what part of the "us" might even have authority to change the website, even if they volunteer the time and prove to be adequately capable of doing so. I'm sure at some level those running F@H would authorize or suggest wording to use, as those with authority on the matter would want to have input on the information provided. And it might take some interaction between certain people for website changes to me made.

I haven't raised my hand to coordinate any communications that would allow website updates, nor have I seen anyone else do it. I'm just as guilty as the next person of not being part of the "fix" in that regard. But it could also be that others have offered yet the people with the final say are simply just too busy to deal with it. There are other known errors or outdated information on the website as well, but correcting or changing them involves the same process.


And in either case, the community of "us" here is provided the current up to date information to the best extent known by communicating here or on other channels. For now it's the best we can do until there is a pool of volunteers that may or may not be granted authority to make website and/or other community building information. It's the best we can do unless or until other methods are employed to keep everything current and up to date.

I see a lot of assumptions thrown here.
1st: main reason why FAH loses a donor is not because donor cannot finish the work due to the short deadlines. Biggest reason is electricity costs, fear that hardware will break and other activities with that hardware. Majority of the people who joined during COVID were gamers, and they had hardware which was plenty fast. Yet nearly all of them left, because that's the world we live in. You have trending thing going on, everyone is on hype train, until electricity bills comes in, or their OCed hardware starts failing, and they don't want to back down because their hardware is 100% stable in games. So NO, user experience has nothing to do with why one would join or leave FAH. I mean when you join you want to contribute when or if possible. If it is impossible to contribute, that is still fine. Sometimes it's the thought that counts. Yes there were some discussions to gamify FAH software, but that died out when everyone jumped off the free time high horse and went back to work
2nd: researchers who do work here have set deadlines and try to get results before the set deadline. That in turn dictates the project WU timeouts and deadlines. If researchers sets an expiration date of a month on a WU, they will have to wait for results for few years, because it only takes several super slow PCs to hold one WU up and the rest of the hardware is waiting too. Every WU generates next WU.
If your PC is too slow, and you cannot contribute anymore, that is OK. Everyone thanks you for contribution, no hard feelings. We have to understand, hardware progress is at all time high in regards to scientific applications, we cannot expect to support the slowest PCs. It just makes no sense.
With GPUs we have an option to disable certain families of GPUs which are too slow, or do not support required features anymore. With CPUs it is more difficult, as fahclient cannot tell the difference between 10 year old quad core and latest quad core. It only sees number of threads and what instruction set is being supported. We try to limit certain projects to higher minimum thread count but it doesn't work all the time.
With limited resources, project only has so much time to cater for everyone

But at the same time Muziqaz, isn't that just assumption as well? People probably come and go for a large variety of reasons, and user experience might be among them. If we knew all the reasons the list is probably long, but if we can fix any of them we might end up with more people folding. I don't see anything wrong with that myself.

Don't get my wrong, gear concerns and electricity bills are probably on the list. I had a friend at work that had heard that folding would "burn up his gear" so he wouldn't put his 1660ti to work. And for those with power hungry cards electricity is surely on the list, as it's a long term cost.

But on the flip side, look at how many people are on various "coin" teams where the coin is worth nothing or next to nothing, but it keeps them folding. Granted they might be on another persons electric bill but they fold.

BobWilliams757 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 5:30 am But at the same time Muziqaz, isn't that just assumption as well? People probably come and go for a large variety of reasons, and user experience might be among them. If we knew all the reasons the list is probably long, but if we can fix any of them we might end up with more people folding. I don't see anything wrong with that myself.

Don't get my wrong, gear concerns and electricity bills are probably on the list. I had a friend at work that had heard that folding would "burn up his gear" so he wouldn't put his 1660ti to work. And for those with power hungry cards electricity is surely on the list, as it's a long term cost.

But on the flip side, look at how many people are on various "coin" teams where the coin is worth nothing or next to nothing, but it keeps them folding. Granted they might be on another persons electric bill but they fold.

That assumption is coming from many years of experience and is well calculated
We knew that all people who joined during COVID would leave, and we were 100% sure it would not be because of user experience. "Coin" teams prove my point of people's mindset "I am getting some coin back, let's ignore of its value, but I am getting something back". FAH has never and will never offer anything like that. FAH can only work of altruism and people's desire to help. In this world not too many are acting just out of kindness, majority always are looking for something to gain, be it attention, or monetary stuff or some other things. COVID was this group/herd mentality type of thing, everyone is hyped about this, let's do it, and then forget about it, as hype dies out. Though I'm not gonna lie, we gained quite a lot of new members and cooperation out of that situation

Thanks for your empirical assessment, muziqaz.

We knew that all people who joined during COVID would leave, and we were 100% sure it would not be because of user experience.

But this is only considering the people who joined, not those that were on the fence about joining but ultimately didn't. You have no data about those folks, hence my assumptions about UX aren't entirely invalid I believe.

Thoughts?

I'm certain we don't know every persons feelings
However, FAH is no nonsense protein folding project. Every tool is there to give best chance for researchers to complete their work. Project will never satisfy everyone

I agree the tools are here, and there will always be people that aren't satisfied. But at the same time, there are quite a few newer folders that stayed from the COVID rush, and many are power folders.

I think many of us have a background in computer stuff, and we were playing with computers for some reason before. Folding is easy for people with such a background, as they understand some basics of equipment limits, troubleshooting, etc. For the person that has never cracked open a computer case, it leaves them on the fence as to the demands and what they might have to do. They probably want a more "Plug and Play" approach.

Bob, your concerns about who is running the show, particularly on our side (forum, hardware, etc) is a very important 'governance' issue I feel. Thanks for thinking about this.

I'm not sure how we should approach this given I assume most people don't have significant time required (both researchers and donators) to dedicate to the 'community' (of approximately 10,000 donators by my estimates).

I believe we as users should have a say in how we operate both morally, and for operational advantage: 1) we can run more independently of the researchers. That allows them to concentrate on research not community building. 2) it allows us more 'buy-in' from prospective donators as they will feel that their wishes are taking into account more (than if part of a 'top-down', authoritarian entity).

Basically I'm advocating for a co-operative model between the donators and the researchers, with donators forming a separate entity that liaises with researchers. Maybe we legally setup as a non-profit to accept donations of money?

There are businesses that provide services in this area (Digital Ocean, AWS, etc) so in my head we might have some latitude to provide services and charge for them, perhaps? Not charge the researchers, but other entities perhaps.

It's hard to make decisions with such little data and input from only a select group of people, but seems that's the way it goes sometimes when people are busy doing other things.

nchowlett,

There already is somewhat a cooperative model between the donators and researchers. Often questions here are forwarded to the appropriate researcher if there is a project concern (crashing hardware, unstable, inconsistent, etc), and beta team members test projects (and at times cores and such) before release to the folding masses. Beta team work weeds out major issues and usually most minor issues as well. Usually the direct communication between the folding masses and researchers is limited, but at times certain researchers will pop into the forums to address specific concerns, provide input, or ask for more information on specifics of a project problem.

As for any legal concern as a non profit, there should be no need to have two organizations. F@H as it is now operates as a non profit and any contribution of finances or equipment, support, etc would already be covered. As a note on this status, I stumbled across this recently....

https://foldingathome.org/donate/?lng=en

This breaks down how donations would be used, and addresses a number of items which get brought up here in the forums, with the first listed one being "Redesign the website for a better user experience". I'm sure if a qualified company or individual offered to do all this work, they could do so and if desired probably be compensated with the tax deduction appropriate with codes and regs on such things. And I think that page reflects that those that make the decisions already are listening to wishes and desires of the community.

If any or all of "us" could make the website, recruiting, user experience, etc better and remain within any constraints set down by those running the show, I'm sure they would be all for it. In some cases it might involve decisions that would possibly change policy or restrictions on use, so that the community gets the proper representation of what is or is not desired, use of F@H tools, forum, etc.


I'm not quite getting your angle on charging for services. But in the end if it's legal and makes F@H better funded, people might be open to it.


Until some of these things take place, the community experience is what we make of it. I don't think any one of us has all the answers, but as a group we probably have many if not most of them.

Thanks Bob. You got me thinking about my assumptions about research intellectual property produced and government grants:

I donate in part as I think governments self-interest in biasing our own country leads them to fund research that primarily benefits them. But I don't want this, I want the research to be 'open-sourced' (not bound up in patents) to benefit other developing countries that cannot compete financially to buy vaccines. Do you know of F@H policy regarding IP? And what are your thoughts?

I also assume that the researchers do not have adequate funded time on other normal (non-distributed) supercomputers, thus are doing this whole distributed thing in the first place. Hence their ability to choose another tool isn't that easy, as they will need to go thru a competitive process to get extra funding (if for example 'we' all stop donating) that might take years until they get access to the hardware. Any ideas on this?

Thanks for the link, it clarifies more their objectives too.

My angle on charging was just trying to increase revenue for them, that's all. Regards, Nick

And for those with power hungry cards electricity is surely on the list, as it's a long term cost.

In Victoria (Australia) our renewable energy system is geared such that the financial incentive for putting energy back into the grid isn't very good (soon to be none), such that the option of using that energy for powering a cluster of cards is made more attractive. My friend is happy to host my computer system as I don't have solar panels. But you would need to add extra solar panels, perhaps, or run partially during day with some software scripting to turn on/off.

nchowlett wrote: ↑Sun Mar 26, 2023 11:53 pm I donate in part as I think governments self-interest in biasing our own country leads them to fund research that primarily benefits them. But I don't want this, I want the research to be 'open-sourced' (not bound up in patents) to benefit other developing countries that cannot compete financially to buy vaccines. Do you know of F@H policy regarding IP? And what are your thoughts?

All research gets published in widely available journals. Under the usual policies connected to many of the US funding sources, the research papers can be embargoed from being freely available for at most 12 months, after that they are required to be open to access by all. I don't know the exact policies some of the F@h Consortium members in other countries have to follow, but as far as I know they also make their results available to all.

The data sets are available to other researchers by request. Some are open for download by all, for example links to several are posted on this page - https://foldingathome.org/data/.

As part of their commitment to providing open-sourced results that can benefit other developing countries, F@h is a participant in the COVID Moonshot. Here is one news release from one of the F@h Consortium member labs - https://www.mskcc.org/news/shooting-moo ... -discovery.

A list of current and past F@h Consortium members is available here - https://foldingathome.org/about-2/the-f ... onsortium/.