[reader50]

We need one. We are slipping in too many projects. Over the past several weeks, more stats units have left than have joined. Inactives control all of the team rosters.

My own idea of recruiting through the best stats seems stalemated for months to come. Server speed issues, and tons of code yet to do. If I can talk Scott into getting a night job, that would speed up the $3K worth of new server muscle that we need to make pages load fast. The unfinished code would still need doing though.

A more active team website might help. It would require perhaps a month to clean up some backend issues, and get a Publisher working, so other people could post news. No stats upgrades could happen though while that was going on. Right now, I need to mosey over there and get News / Milestones up to date. Getting the D2OL stats working first seemed more important, but the team site has to keep running too. Resource pages for all projects would help, but they take time to build. I need to rewrite several already there, they are out of date or poorly written.

Competitions increase participation. The new stats can work nicely for competitions, with tables and graphs that update constantly. It would take perhaps two weeks to work out the Competitions modules ... but again, no other upgrades would happen if we rushed that. On the plus side, it would allow us to set up full coverage of virtually any race, and do it on the drop of a hat. 15 minutes to set the race particulars, and the page would start covering it.

Direct recruiting has not worked too well in other MacNN forums. The usual result:

"Are you crazy? I don't want my computer running 24/7 on this stupid program."
"Go away, quit bothering us. We're busy."
"Does this have something to do with my speeding tickets?"
"I'm already crunching for Team Other. Thanks though, we like your speed tips."

Recruiting in the forums of other Mac sites has been discussed a few times. Most have DC teams today, but usually not in as many projects as we do. Recruiting for specific projects might work.

I've noticed that team interest seems to go up when we investigate a new project. Often, a bunch of new people jump in, and some of them will presently explore our other projects. They usually stick around, crunching here and there. This goes against the opinion of keeping a tight focus on a few projects, but perhaps we could deliberately spread ourselves around further. Become the one Mac team that is in every Mac-compatible project. If they want team services on a new project, they have to join our team or crunch solo. This may have worked on dFold, we are the only Mac team in the Top 100, and have spent a lot of time in the Top 10. Very visible.

Anyway ... does anyone have some ideas? Shall we give away free girlfriends/boyfriends to new recruits? Let's come up with a conspiracy to become the #1 team in every project.

[jarling]

I've been wanting to approach "The Geeks," the computer services people at my school to see if I can run SETI (all the macs are OS 9) on the lab computers but I dont feel like I know enough to ask them to do this.

My small suggestion is maybe one member (need not be Scott or Reader) prepare a letter that those of us in school could present to the computing services people. It could be upfront about the costs to the school (electricity, bandwidth, wear and tear, responsiveness of the computers once these programs are installed, do you need to "babysit" the programs...) as well as the benefits. Obviously I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs or else I wouldnt be running it on my own computer. However, I only am dealing with a single, private computer and I can put up with the minor hassles. I have no way of quantifying lab-wide issues and concerns and thus doubt I can successfully present them in a convincing proposal.

I feel like this simple action would have a large effect because for each person who uses the letter, the team gains a whole computer lab as opposed to another single member.

[DAlex]

I like Jarlings idea, might be some mileage in that.

Is there any way when could direct our attentions to those inactive members? I've been inactive for a couple of months but a call to arms for the F@H challenge from the pups got me back online. Is it acceptable to email our inactive members just as a one off?

I like the competitions idea, I 'd love to take part in regular races - some friends of mine who crunch for the OCUK SETI team have a kind of league with other teams, boosts morale and keeps interest high. In addition, when I took part in the dfold competition a loooong while back it encouraged me to recruit friends to lend me spare capacity (just look at the success of enola in the particular incident!).

I'll shoot some emails off to mac users I know and see if they will come on board, every bit helps - also I'll approach my local MUG.

DAlex

[krove]

On the website front, why don't we implement an OSS solution like Geeklog? It is easily customizable, managable, and would also allow users, when logged in to see personalized stats at the home page. Email me if you want more information. (I setup my company Intranet with Geeklog, modifications, additions, etc.)

As for money, post a paypal link / image somewhere that's very visible.

As for recruiting, I think we should get current members more interested before seeking new membership. Just in folding, the number of inactive users is quite alarming. If there were a way to contact these users (say the originator of the team), it should be done. Remind them of new stuff (like the stats), etc.

[mikkyo]

Here is your master plan...
PC users far far far far far far far outnumber mac users. Therefore mac users should all band together. Us and every other mac team should group together. All macs sites should encourage everyone to join one team so that all 20M mac users can give the world a real ass-kicking. It is really the only way. So silly to have the little teams of little mac groups going up against a teams 800X their size.
If we all joined something like Team Apple, it would really show up everyone.
Apple itself has a couple seti teams which is pretty silly too.
Mac Users Unite!
Everyone can stand for Apple and Mac and forget about further breaking up the mac community into little groups/cliques.
Hell, just 100K G4s against any team would be an amazing thing.
Really, this is the only way to reall show the world what the mac is capable of.
Otherwise it is onesies and twosies.
If leaders all over band together and agree to just go for it, one team for all, and all for one, it would be better for the whole community.

[krove]

I had this same thought a couple days ago, but was too afraid to bring it up.

Although I'm proud to identify with my MacNN community, identifying with Apple alone would truly rally the several mac teams to perhaps join forces. If we can convince their leaders, setup an affliated domain / website for all mac communities to link to, I believe the other teams would agree that fighting together against the world of PCs is far better than fighting alone and against one another.

There's my 2¢

[jarling]

Could we pesuade MacNN to write a legitimate piece on the distributed computing "movement?" Talk about the various projects available for the Mac...and the various teams. Of course it would all be done in a very informational, unbiased manner.

Another idea is to figure out why members are drawn to other mac-centric teams. While I know its taboo to enter their forums and try to recruit them, is there a polite way of posing the question in other mac-based team forums why they like the team they are with. How we use that information, I'm not quite sure...I pose that to the brain-trust.

[gumby5647]

Here are my thoughts on this. IMO:

i think we spread out to much too soon. i think we should have stuck to SETI and RC5 longer. It seems that people used to be on a team, (seti or RC5) but when people left to crunch other projects they saw the team stall and start going nowhere, and then stopped crunching.

[gumby5647]

Ok, well, i slept on it and did some thinking and here's what i've come up with.

Well, we've come this far. We can't simply just abandon projects. So I propose we have seperate teams. Much like Ars does with their projects. Each team would have two captians/leaders which would be responsible for writing up news/milestones at least once a week, be responsible for their own recruiting, pep talks and troubleshooting .

This would leave reader time to work on stats. occasionally having to stop to post the news and milestones that the team leaders turn in.

Now we don't have to go and give them weird names like Ars does (team egg roll, team stir fry etc)

We just need to get focused and organized with our projects and that is how I propose doing it.

thoughts?

Is there any way when could direct our attentions to those inactive members? I've been inactive for a couple of months but a call to arms for the F@H challenge from the pups got me back online. Is it acceptable to email our inactive members just as a one off?

I've also been curious about this as well. This might prove useful, esp in the SETI area.

[proux]

I like the idea of one bigger team. It really feels like the team has lost members on SETI when it started many other projects. Another reason there has been losing interest is that Macs are not very good at SETI vs PC, it is hard to compete. On SETI we should try to merge with Team O'Grady, that would make a nice team. People like to be on a team that grows and has prospects. This is not the case of the SETI Team MacNN anymore. A merger would create a huge renewed interest for both teams. The other big SETI Mac player is Macaddict. They have an active forum and but they could use MacNN better stats. XLR8yourmac also has a couple of smaller teams in several projects. They have a lot of fanatics, the kind that help animate a team.

Active news and good stats are key to the team, it is what make people come back to the site and want to join the team.

[krove]

I think merging mac teams is a great idea, but there aren't too many other voices, particularly from the leaders of our team, Reader and Scott. Care to chime in?

[jarling]

I just had an idea while looking around the new stats. We already give a shout out to those who have reached certain milestones. Well, I think joining the team and completing your first unit is a milestone and should be recognized. I'm thinking a message could be sent. Of course, this would require that they also take a peak at the forums...but we can try it.

For instance:

Spock, I want to welcome you to TeamMacNN and our folding@home team. I see you've crunched a little for a number of teams. I hope you find this one fun and inviting. In case youre interested, see how youre doing here

http://teamstats.macnn.com/fold/stat...p1&UID=298

[proux]

jarling, good idea!

[reader50]

Originally posted by krove:
... but there aren't too many other voices, particularly from the leaders of our team, Reader and Scott. Care to chime in?

I'm trying to keep quiet, and let others post their opinions. If you check the forum listings, all too many threads end when one of us posts. It's not a team of two, it's a team for everyone, and my opinions should not squeeze out everyone else's. It's been a whole lot more interesting with lots of people kicking ideas in, who knows where we will end up? I hadn't thought of jarling's call-out idea, or several of the other ideas put forth.

One minor correction. The inactives on our roster are a little deceptive, I took some literary license there. Many inactives on one project are just crunching on a different project, such as myself. I've been active continuously for over a year, but always show as inactive on most projects - only one box that can crunch. The final stats engine may give a more useful "Active/Inactive Members" readout that takes all projects into consideration.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by krove:
I think merging mac teams is a great idea, but there aren't too many other voices, particularly from the leaders of our team, Reader and Scott. Care to chime in?

I have a nasty problem of killing threads when I post in them.
This weekend I will post.

[krove]

In the meantime, I'll post so as to revive the thread, keeping it warm for all team members to voice an opinion.

[jarling]

I seem to be full of ideas, so heres another.

Could someone post an update on the folding@home forums in the Teams area (or anywhere else where it would fit) about our new stats and encourage people to take a look. It might at least bring a little traffic our way.

Reader50 could you do this since you know the most about what our stats have to offer.

On that note, I think we need to update the Folding page so that it has a link to the stats.

[Arkham_c]

I think making a "Team Mac" that includes TeamMacNN, MacAddict, and the others is a great idea. We could work it out so that stats could be distributed in some format that could be used by all "local homes" for the team. So MacNN could provide stats, and MacAddict could do their own stats, and XLR8 could do their own stats, but it's all gathered centrally.

We'd need a major effort to make it happen, but wouldn't it be cool?

[gumby5647]

merging of teams is easier said than done.

With SETI one would have to make the new Super team. Then we'd have to get everyone from all teams to switch over. It'd be a pain in the a$$ and i'd be willing to bet some people wouldn't do it and others would do it but soon lose interest.

[Toast]

The "problem" with having a super team in Folding@home, is that everyone would have to start over, seeing as credits cannot be transferred to other teams. SETI could work, but like Gumby said, people would need to change their team affiliation, and if they have forgotten their account PW, and no longer have access to their Email acct. then they're stuck.

Oh, and maybe they have forgotten they left it running... hehehe

I dunno about other projects, I think RC5 allows team switching, I kinda forget...it's been awhile since i was really involved in that.

oh well that's my 2cents....

[krove]

With one team, however, the sheer number of users would easily push us up the ladder.

[passmaster16]

I agree with the other guys. I think our best method of attack is to try to form one big team. Of course I'm not sure what kind of response we will get from our fellow Mac teams, but I think we should seriously consider the idea. The difference with Mac users is that they are generally more "united" than PC users. We all share that one common quality: we love our Macs. So my suggestion is to get the word out to other Mac teams and see what their response is.

[gumby5647]

I think our best method of attack is to try to form one big team.

as they say on hollywood squares......."I Disagree"




Circle gets the square!!

[passmaster16]

Well we can fool ourselves into thinking this is going to improve but the bottom line is people want to be somewhat competitive. I know I am interested in it and when I say "more competitive", I mean on a team level more so than a personal one. I'm not going to disagree that a transition would be difficult, but if we don't do something then I'd expect these numbers to drop more and more. What will happen is people, maybe including me at some point, will either:
a.) switch to a team that is more competitive (not necessarily in the top 10 right now, but moving in a positive direction) OR
b.) will just stop running the clients all together

Both are equally damaging to our numbers.

[reader50]

A thought. Must we limit ourselves to recruiting Mac owners? As I understand it, much of our power comes from PCs at work. How about Mac sympathizers, perhaps Switchers waiting for the next PowerMac?

I would not even chew out PC diehards who are here for the stats. After crunching here for a while and posting, who knows? They might just get their first iBook to see what it's all about.

[gumby5647]

i think our first measure of attack should be to email/message the inactives.

I've already talked to Murbot and he said he'd forgotten about SETI, but would be more than willing to start up again when he gets his new iMac when they update them.

[passmaster16]

Originally posted by reader50:
A thought. Must we limit ourselves to recruiting Mac owners? As I understand it, much of our power comes from PCs at work. How about Mac sympathizers, perhaps Switchers waiting for the next PowerMac?

I would not even chew out PC diehards who are here for the stats. After crunching here for a while and posting, who knows? They might just get their first iBook to see what it's all about.

I don't think we should limit ourselves. The majority of my production comes from my PCs. I'd have a difficult time turning away anybody who wants to jump on and contribute.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by reader50:
We need one. We are slipping in too many projects. Over the past several weeks, more stats units have left than have joined. Inactives control all of the team rosters.

Aye, that we do.

If I can talk Scott into getting a night job, that would speed up the $3K worth of new server muscle that we need to make pages load fast.

You mean $10K-$15K?
I need something on the order of 2 or 3 dual proc boxes, one of which needs a SCSI raid setup.
73GB SCSI drives are not cheap.

A more active team website might help. It would require perhaps a month to clean up some backend issues, and get a Publisher working, so other people could post news. No stats upgrades could happen though while that was going on. Right now, I need to mosey over there and get News / Milestones up to date. Getting the D2OL stats working first seemed more important, but the team site has to keep running too. Resource pages for all projects would help, but they take time to build. I need to rewrite several already there, they are out of date or poorly written.

Other people writing would be a great thing.
Perhaps provide a template that people can use? We have plenty of example pages, but something for non HTML people would be nice.

Competitions increase participation. The new stats can work nicely for competitions, with tables and graphs that update constantly. It would take perhaps two weeks to work out the Competitions modules ... but again, no other upgrades would happen if we rushed that. On the plus side, it would allow us to set up full coverage of virtually any race, and do it on the drop of a hat. 15 minutes to set the race particulars, and the page would start covering it.

Sounds cool. Hopefully you can give a few people access to a CP that can setup races.
Yeah, add a stats CP to the list of things to make

Direct recruiting has not worked too well in other MacNN forums. The usual result:Recruiting in the forums of other Mac sites has been discussed a few times. Most have DC teams today, but usually not in as many projects as we do. Recruiting for specific projects might work.

Readership on this forum, along with the lack of new macs, has helped. Laptops are less likely to run DC, and Apple is focusing on them. Also, with new macs being so loud, who wants them on at night?

I've noticed that team interest seems to go up when we investigate a new project. Often, a bunch of new people jump in, and some of them will presently explore our other projects. They usually stick around, crunching here and there. This goes against the opinion of keeping a tight focus on a few projects, but perhaps we could deliberately spread ourselves around further. Become the one Mac team that is in every Mac-compatible project. If they want team services on a new project, they have to join our team or crunch solo. This may have worked on dFold, we are the only Mac team in the Top 100, and have spent a lot of time in the Top 10. Very visible.

I don't want to see us spread thinly. While it may attract some new members, it doesn't seem to stick around that well, and offers no real net gain.
Also, it makes us a bit more confusing to people looking to join, and it's a pain stats wise.
I'd rather not have us become another ars with regard to joining every DC project around. For us, focus is a good thing. I'd like to see a 5 project limit at the most.

Anyway ... does anyone have some ideas? Shall we give away free girlfriends/boyfriends to new recruits? Let's come up with a conspiracy to become the #1 team in every project.

We do need a comprehensive plan. Part of that is moving away from just you and I being super active. We need a larger, self sustaining user-base, which is something we just don't have. We also need to get more front page news up, we usually get some members when that happens.
Also, we need to find some way to get some of the system administrators on this board running DC.
I'm really not sure what-else.


I do believe that we need a little more of a plan for this team.
Other people can chime in on this one.

Originally posted by jarling:
I've been wanting to approach "The Geeks," the computer services people at my school to see if I can run SETI (all the macs are OS 9) on the lab computers but I dont feel like I know enough to ask them to do this.

My small suggestion is maybe one member (need not be Scott or Reader) prepare a letter that those of us in school could present to the computing services people. It could be upfront about the costs to the school (electricity, bandwidth, wear and tear, responsiveness of the computers once these programs are installed, do you need to "babysit" the programs...) as well as the benefits. Obviously I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs or else I wouldnt be running it on my own computer. However, I only am dealing with a single, private computer and I can put up with the minor hassles. I have no way of quantifying lab-wide issues and concerns and thus doubt I can successfully present them in a convincing proposal.

I feel like this simple action would have a large effect because for each person who uses the letter, the team gains a whole computer lab as opposed to another single member.

I've already done this, it was in response to a post by jsnuff a few months ago. Also, there were some questions about it just a few weeks ago again.

One: http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=126989
Two: http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=139377
I'd be happy to make changes and help anyone who wants to do that.
I also know that mikkyo and welnic a few others really know what they are doing and could provide some stuff that I can't, like scripts to keep running only when logged out.

Originally posted by DAlex:
I like Jarlings idea, might be some mileage in that.

Is there any way when could direct our attentions to those inactive members? I've been inactive for a couple of months but a call to arms for the F@H challenge from the pups got me back online. Is it acceptable to email our inactive members just as a one off?

I don't have a problem with some sort of Announcement mailing list. I have the software to do that. However, it has to be opt in. I won't allow anything else.

I like the competitions idea, I 'd love to take part in regular races - some friends of mine who crunch for the OCUK SETI team have a kind of league with other teams, boosts morale and keeps interest high. In addition, when I took part in the dfold competition a loooong while back it encouraged me to recruit friends to lend me spare capacity (just look at the success of enola in the particular incident!).

We can do that. Unless I'm mistaken, we'll have the ability to easily setup races via a web control panel soon enough (right reader50?). That will make things easy racewise.

I'll shoot some emails off to mac users I know and see if they will come on board, every bit helps - also I'll approach my local MUG.

DAlex

That's a good approach. Also, once we have the ability to setup subteams, MUGs could be a listed subteam within the whole team.

Originally posted by krove:
On the website front, why don't we implement an OSS solution like Geeklog? It is easily customizable, managable, and would also allow users, when logged in to see personalized stats at the home page. Email me if you want more information. (I setup my company Intranet with Geeklog, modifications, additions, etc.)

Are you volunteering?
It would take a bit of customization, if not more, to make it all work.
However, it would provide the publisher component that we need, along with the user authentication for the personals stats page. I'll check with reader50, then you can expect an email.

As for money, post a paypal link / image somewhere that's very visible.

No. I'm not accepting donations. I will have a link to some affiliate places where you can buy from, once I get time to set them up.

As for recruiting, I think we should get current members more interested before seeking new membership. Just in folding, the number of inactive users is quite alarming. If there were a way to contact these users (say the originator of the team), it should be done. Remind them of new stuff (like the stats), etc.

Great idea. How do we get the word out?

[Scotttheking]

And part two, because there is a 10K word limit on posts

Originally posted by mikkyo:
Here is your master plan...
PC users far far far far far far far outnumber mac users. Therefore mac users should all band together. Us and every other mac team should group together. All macs sites should encourage everyone to join one team so that all 20M mac users can give the world a real ass-kicking. It is really the only way. So silly to have the little teams of little mac groups going up against a teams 800X their size.
If we all joined something like Team Apple, it would really show up everyone.
Apple itself has a couple seti teams which is pretty silly too.
Mac Users Unite!
Everyone can stand for Apple and Mac and forget about further breaking up the mac community into little groups/cliques.
Hell, just 100K G4s against any team would be an amazing thing.
Really, this is the only way to reall show the world what the mac is capable of.
Otherwise it is onesies and twosies.
If leaders all over band together and agree to just go for it, one team for all, and all for one, it would be better for the whole community.

Ok, how do we do this? A lot of people don't want to just join some team, they want to be affiliated with the team that is affiliated with some place they frequent. To go and announce that everyone should just leave their team and come somewhere else and then expect them to do it is, to say the least, outlandish.

We'd have to totally remove ourselves from macnn, which would include getting a domain name, setting up a forum, and other fun things.

I have no problem considering it.

Originally posted by jarling:
Could we pesuade MacNN to write a legitimate piece on the distributed computing "movement?" Talk about the various projects available for the Mac...and the various teams. Of course it would all be done in a very informational, unbiased manner.

Why don't you do it?
Expecting macnn to do, well, much of anything beyond what we have now is probably asking too much.

Another idea is to figure out why members are drawn to other mac-centric teams. While I know its taboo to enter their forums and try to recruit them, is there a polite way of posing the question in other mac-based team forums why they like the team they are with. How we use that information, I'm not quite sure...I pose that to the brain-trust.

Go for it.



I think this post is at record length, so I'll stop here.

Keep the ideas flowing.

[krove]

I'd be very willing to setup the Geeklog component, create a theme that matches our current look, etc!

I don't think it would be that difficult to do, as Geeklog is very easy to customize, but offers a great deal of functionality. Basically the theme component would be the hardest, but as GL uses templates, that's not a big deal. All the stats components would be wrapped by the GL header and footer, and user authentication would take place via a cookie (unfortunately, this is the only method currently available until GL v2 is released, which won't be for a while).

[Scotttheking]

krove: check your PMs. You have email locked out.

[krove]

Originally posted by Scotttheking:
krove: check your PMs. You have email locked out.

check your email Scott...

[DAlex]

Well I've emailed a host a people and left a message on my local MUG's messageboard. Going to try a few more people soon and try to blag some CPU time from people who owe me favours....

Are there any other things I could help out with (directed at Reader and Scott) - I can't program or script, I can write (in a fashion! ) and am usually never far from the forums during the day/evening - work is a bit slow

DAlex

[DAlex]

Can a Team Macnn recruiting 'sticky' be added to the top of all the other forums?

Scott, you mentioned
"I don't have a problem with some sort of Announcement mailing list. I have the software to do that. However, it has to be opt in. I won't allow anything else."
This sounds a good idea. Can it be implemented? Not being to familiar with how this would work, how would we ask people if they wanted to opt in? A sticky notice perhaps or a login message?

DAlex

[reader50]

Originally posted by jarling:
... Could someone post an update on the folding@home forums in the Teams area (or anywhere else where it would fit) about our new stats and encourage people to take a look. It might at least bring a little traffic our way.

Reader50 could you do this since you know the most about what our stats have to offer.

On that note, I think we need to update the Folding page so that it has a link to the stats.

Our Folding (and dFold, D2OL) pages have been updated, with links. I'll post something on the Folding boards as well. I'd been wanting to ask them about the Mac Genome core for a long time, so that will get done while I'm there.

Originally posted by DAlex:
Can a Team Macnn recruiting 'sticky' be added to the top of all the other forums?

Scott, you mentioned
"I don't have a problem with some sort of Announcement mailing list. I have the software to do that. However, it has to be opt in. I won't allow anything else."
This sounds a good idea. Can it be implemented? Not being to familiar with how this would work, how would we ask people if they wanted to opt in? A sticky notice perhaps or a login message?

DAlex

When we do recruit in other forums, it's normally limited to three days, and cleared with the forum mods in each affected forum. About the email stuff, people often think of the SETI@home user emails. We can reach those, but sending out unasked-for email isn't very nice today. My own box is full of unrequested email. An opt-in newsletter would be ok ... but how much news do we have? I have a hard time finding news to post, without posting junk.

Once more people can post news, if there really is lots of news, a newsletter could work well to maintain team interest. Not everyone is interested in stats, those that are not are more likely to be interested in news. Such as project results.

We could even try a newletter before more people can post, see how it works out. I could email it out from the team address, but could not help with writing it, time is already over committed. Anyone want to try their hand as a freelance writer?

[DAlex]

Originally posted by reader50:
We could even try a newletter before more people can post, see how it works out. I could email it out from the team address, but could not help with writing it, time is already over committed. Anyone want to try their hand as a freelance writer?

I'm up for that. My work as a publications and press officer covers writing newsletters quite nicely! If you could work out the hows and wheres of formatting and distribution, I'll draft an outline of topics. Then it's a question of regularity, enough to be interesting but not an annoyance.

DAlex

[Scotttheking]

If I can get macnn to point the mail dns entry for team.macnn.com to my server, I can setup email addies, including a moderated mailing list.
We don't need a general mailing list, that's what the forums are for.

[krove]

Here's a picture of Geeklog for Team MacNN:

http://homepage.mac.com/krove/.Pictu...klog_alpha.png

This is still preliminary and requires some work. As for the welcome message: it's pulling data from a setup. Right now, I'm focusing on the templates to get a look and feel consistent with our current layout.

If anyone is willing to contribute some 128x128 icons with an OS X look/feel for each project, please send me a private message or post back here.

[reader50]

I've posted about our stats to the Folding(a)Home Teams forum ... though Shaktai beat me to it.

Also asked about our missing Genome crunch core, thread link on our Genome news page.

krove, do you need page files from our current setup?

[DAlex]

Team MacNN Newsletter ideas- possible topics

1) Review of the current state/position of all the teams
2) Look at which members are charging up the ranks
3) Welcome to new members
4) A 'chat' with a key team member about the systems/specs they use and why Team MacNN
5) A 'chat/interview' with someone from one of the DC projects
6) Timetable for upcoming interviews
7) A competitions section - next race, who's in, who won e.t.c
8) A "people I have recruited section" for active members to contribute to

Points 4 and 5 would be based on 5 to 10 questions used for all the 'chats' - e.g for 4) Why do you crunch for Team Macnn? Also this would reduce the work of having to come up with new questions every time

Any thoughts?

DAlex

[proux]

Couple more quick perks to get more people in the team:


a speed table with user entries to put their scores ("a la" XBench) and get time references

On the SETI side a review of the current small programs like SETI Dockling or SETI Menu.

[mikkyo]

Ok, how do we do this? A lot of people don't want to just join some team, they want to be affiliated with the team that is affiliated with some place they frequent. To go and announce that everyone should just leave their team and come somewhere else and then expect them to do it is, to say the least, outlandish.

We'd have to totally remove ourselves from macnn, which would include getting a domain name, setting up a forum, and other fun things.

I have no problem considering it.

The only way would be to talk to the leaders of other mac teams and see if they also agree that it would be a good idea.
Then agree on a team name for everyone to join like TeamMac or Apple or something.
You don't necessarily need a domain and website and forums. Eveyrone could keep their sites active, just tell folks to join TeamMac. They can read our forums, use our stats, or their own. You just have to start a giant migration to one single team. If it works, then maybe folks can start thinking about a domain name and hosting things.

I think the key benefit is that the numbers will speak for themselves. If you add up all the mac specific teams the total gets pretty big fast. Everyone wants to win right? Well this will help make everyone a winner. Plus I bet if folks all band together to support one team, it will get featured on every mac news site and maybe even Apple. Wouldn't that be nice.

[proux]

Very nice
Going over MacAddict to check their forum...

[reader50]

The last time the MacAddicts stopped by, they were trying to recruit all of us for the big Mac team ... theirs, to be specific. It would be kinda interesting to return the favor.

Personally, I jumped ship from MacAddict a long time ago. They had a dead team site, no stats, and everyone I knew was over here. If we could whip the team site to a much more active level, we just might recruit a lot more. Including PC users who might be repelled by the Master Macintosh Team.

Even if we got all 5% of Mac DC users, yes it is a lot. But it would be hard to take #1 in even one project, people crunch where they choose to most of the time. This is a marketing situation, a matter of persuading people to jump in. What we could really use is some way to entice non-DC users into the fold. Probably less than 10% of computer users even know what Distributed Computing is.

Bumper stickers, or t-shirts? A 30-sec superbowl ad would certainly have drawn a lot of attention, for only $2 mil.

[Shaktai]

Originally posted by reader50:
Even if we got all 5% of Mac DC users, yes it is a lot. But it would be hard to take #1 in even one project, people crunch where they choose to most of the time. This is a marketing situation, a matter of persuading people to jump in. What we could really use is some way to entice non-DC users into the fold. Probably less than 10% of computer users even know what Distributed Computing is.

Hmm! That got me to thinking. In my Nikon 5700 and Evolution@Home forum area, I have a totally dead thread on Distributed Computing in General. Then it is dead, because I have never posted anything there. While it is not a high traffic site, maybe if I post some tidbits and boost Team Macnn, and our "best of class" stats, just maybe one or two folks might find their way over here. http://www.eagles-nest.org/teameagle/phpBB2/index.php

[krove]

A lot of teams lack such a nice stats system as ours (thank you reader), and we should promote (nothing's wrong with bragging, right?) this to specific venues in a polite manner.

Reader is correct in that this really is a battle of marketing and PR. Most people don't realize the simplicity and benefits of DC at large and thus choose to abstain. Here are some issues, I think, stopping non-DC users from jumping into the fray:

1. Power consumption. Someone should really do an analysis on average monthly power consumption: I doubt it is very much.
2. Security: can you trust what is being distributed and downloaded on a regular basis?
3. Interruption / slowing of real work on the computer. Folding@Home, IMHO, doesn't slow my work at all when doing basic stuff like browsing, checking email, etc. Certainly when I launch photoshop and start doing stuff there, I notice the slowdown. DC clients need simple methods of suspending the process. This is generally the case as most or all DC clients have screen saver versions that only activate after a period of inactivity.

Any other issues stopping non-DC users from joining in? Our job, as members of Team MacNN and the DC community at large should be to dispel some of these misconceptions.

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by krove:
Here's a picture of Geeklog for Team MacNN:

http://homepage.mac.com/krove/.Pictu...klog_alpha.png

This is still preliminary and requires some work. As for the welcome message: it's pulling data from a setup. Right now, I'm focusing on the templates to get a look and feel consistent with our current layout.

If anyone is willing to contribute some 128x128 icons with an OS X look/feel for each project, please send me a private message or post back here.

Looks great.
It will be really neat if we can have this up in 2 or 3 weeks.
I may have found a graphics guy who will do the images, he'll let me know.

Once it's all setup, then we can figure out what features we want to use, and any other issues that need dealing with.

Originally posted by DAlex:
Team MacNN Newsletter ideas- possible topics

1) Review of the current state/position of all the teams
2) Look at which members are charging up the ranks
3) Welcome to new members
4) A 'chat' with a key team member about the systems/specs they use and why Team MacNN
5) A 'chat/interview' with someone from one of the DC projects
6) Timetable for upcoming interviews
7) A competitions section - next race, who's in, who won e.t.c
8) A "people I have recruited section" for active members to contribute to

Points 4 and 5 would be based on 5 to 10 questions used for all the 'chats' - e.g for 4) Why do you crunch for Team Macnn? Also this would reduce the work of having to come up with new questions every time

Any thoughts?

DAlex

It couldn't be very frequent, no more then once a week, at the very highest, probably less often then that.
I'm still waiting on word from macnn as to whether I'll get the change needed to send emails from team.macnn.com.
If you want to start something, I can test my mailing list stuff on a test email addy with one of my domains.
Let me know what stuff you need.


Another idea I have is that we could do arranged times for IRC chats, either topic based, or just to chat.
What do you all think?

[reader50]

Originally posted by DAlex:
Team MacNN Newsletter ideas- possible topics

1) Review of the current state/position of all the teams
2) Look at which members are charging up the ranks
3) Welcome to new members
4) A 'chat' with a key team member about the systems/specs they use and why Team MacNN
5) A 'chat/interview' with someone from one of the DC projects
6) Timetable for upcoming interviews
7) A competitions section - next race, who's in, who won e.t.c
8) A "people I have recruited section" for active members to contribute to

Points 4 and 5 would be based on 5 to 10 questions used for all the 'chats' - e.g for 4) Why do you crunch for Team Macnn? Also this would reduce the work of having to come up with new questions every time

Any thoughts?

DAlex

Looks pretty good. Some thoughts, as requested:

I'd recommend against numbering them, give the topics titles instead. Numbers force you to keep them in the initial order, and might obligate every topic to be present in every issue. Also, what if a new topic would logically fit between two? You end up with Topic 6.5

How about a How-To topic (needs more catchy title than that) where some operation is explained carefully. Perhaps how to cron Folding CLI to run in the background on restart. Or how to make Ubero run in OS 9 - I've still got ideas to try on that.

hmm ... oh, #6 = bad. Can't lock ourselves into tight schedules on a free-time project. That gets old in a hurry even when it's something you are being paid to do.

possible catchy titles:
2) The Dangerous Ones / The Fast Lane
3) Fresh Meat (well, probably not )
4) Secrets Revealed
6.5) psst ... try this
8) I caught them, I caught them!

[DAlex]

Originally posted by reader50:
possible catchy titles:
2) The Dangerous Ones / The Fast Lane
3) Fresh Meat (well, probably not )
4) Secrets Revealed
6.5) psst ... try this
8) I caught them, I caught them!

Cheers Reader, yeah no. 6 would be a bit of a pain, I'll get to work on the other topic areas ASAP (fear not, the numbers were only there for ideas purposes, wouldn't want to end up with a 10.2.3, oh wait...)

I liked the second title idea, The Dangerous Ones.

Hey Scott, would you care to be the first interviewee,

For the How to section - bit beyond me, that would probably be best from some of our hot dog team members (Cobramac, Mikkyo, Scott, welnic, Shaktai or yourself Reader e.t.c).

Right I'm off to start drafting.

DAlex

[reader50]

On second thought, you are right on the How-To things. Serious technical solutions should go on the team site (Resource Sections). Maybe things that are more so-so technical. For example, how to carefully benchmark one of the clients. Shaktai in particular has put time into this and come up with high quality numbers. I've certainly used them.

Other tips might include how to persuade school sys admins to install clients. It felt like the How-Tos would be contributed by various members from time to time.

Edit: maybe "Guest Writer" would be a better topic for this sort of thing? It may cover How-tos, but would not be limited to that.