Is there a projected commencement date for the project yet?

-ChinookFöhn

Cool! (the 1960s/1970s learnt cool) Similar to Leiden but more specific and larger in scope.

Will the grid computing then be an 'internal boinc' amongst participating schools or 'expanded' to boinc in general?

If it were open to everyone that now participates in boinc, I strongly recommend that the message boards be closed to everyone except the participating students, teachers, and administrators.

Ah, the possibilities, leading to thoughts, and I wonder...

Has anyone ever thought of doing a boinc project to research temporal displacement so someone could go back in time and 'invent' integrated circuits and desktop/laptop computers in the 1950s so by the time I am/was in high school I'd have/had the same opportunity? (Part of the language needs to be invented when writing in temporal terms)

-ChinookFöhn

No way to edit and delete the signature as I forgot to disable it when I first posted, especially as it doesn't seem to show correctly?
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Actually, it won't be BOINC at all. We are working with the team at the University of Chicago who are developing the Swift workflow system, and so the big calculations will run under Swift on "The Grid", rather than BOINC.

Ah, I jumped to a false conclusion with the BOINC-like page I saw.

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Yup, that is definitely an issue we have to deal with for schools. And Pirates@Home was used to test out such restrictions. You'll find that only members of the Crew can read the Crew Issues sections, including Pirate Talk, which is why I moved this thread to the more public Announcements forum.

On the mock-up site I've set up (http://www13.i2u2.org - just a test, nothing official yet) there is only one public forum, called The Bulletin Board, and the rest is only open to registered participants. There are several meeting rooms which are open to any registered participant, but intended for development of separate e-Labs. Then we have more private areas. One example is only open to students and teachers from one school or class (basically like one team in BOINC). One is open only to teachers. One only for developers. So we can keep things segregated as appropriate for a school environment.

I can see advantages to have a public forum but after what occurs here in BOINC, enormous disadvantages as well. I suppose if you can track the sender down... however, what if someone extremely offensive writes using an anonymous re-mailer/false-ip-address-sender?

The other issue we have to deal with is personal information. For a school site I thought people would use their real names. For teachers that's fine, but not for students if they can see people outside of their own class. So screen names seem more appropriate, which seemed odd to me at first. Hence we may have both, with the screen name shown in public, and real name shown in private (or to teachers and developers, but not other students).

It might be easier, and to avoid arguments, to just assign project allocated numbers... say the first 4 or 5 digits for a school (depending on the potential number of schools that participate) and then 5 to 9 digits for students (depending if you want duplicated numbers for students but unique only by their school assigned number or each student being unique and how long the project will run). This could avoid, even within schools, students arguing over the same moniker. There would have to be either a single or double check-digit(s) to minimise non-registered participants hacking in.

But I have to say, the idea of students interacting with other students on the Internet is really scary to some teachers and administrators. I'm not sure how we will deal with it, but it may be that we start with teachers only. And yet there could be a lot of value in enabling collaboration between classes too, so we don't want to rule it out.

Yes, I can understand the concerns but I think the advantages, for those students who take the projects seriously, outweigh the disadvantages. I shall assume the fora will be monitored closely, at least upon start up and for some time thereafter. Perhaps you could permit an increasing posts-permitted value. Restrict initial posts to 1 or 2 per day. After a certain period of time, increase the number of posts permitted and continue to do so until the restriction has been removed. However, if there is some sort of 'impolite' post, then that student is, immediately, restricted to 1 or 2 posts again. If necessary, if it was an extremely egregious post, ban the student from posting either for a pre-determined period, or if necessary, for the school year.

I'd also assume there need be an appeals process so for a non-egregious ban, this could be handled by the school of the student and for an egregious ban, by the project administrators who, by necessity, would have an absolute and final say.

Just some early-ish morning thoughts.

-ChinookFöhn

P.S. Have you seen the preview mechanism in BOINCstats? Would it be possible to implement such in Pirates or would that be a strain on bandwidth?

...I think it can be easier than that. If you are interested then I could bounce some of my ideas off of you. Some of it might be specific to this other project, some might turn out to be useful for BOINC forums too.

Bounce away. If , in private, you have my general e-mail address, though I'd prefer using one of my other addresses. If in public, then I'll ensure I look in several times a day instead of just occasionally.

...I'll show you how it works. You'll be banned from posting for 1 hour... ;-)

'Twas an interesting e-mail to read, first thing this morning, Cap'n. Initial reaction was "What?" and then a hearty chuckle. Likely, for students, such a reaction, conceivably, might be somewhat stronger.

-ChinookFöhn

...You mean preview before posting? We had that here before it was introduced into BOINC. And so we do have that on the I2U2 site. But then I updated the forum software here and we lost it. We'll get it back again the next time we update. I hope that it doesn't take too long, but I need to record all the modifications we've made here first, then update, then apply the modifications, so it may take a while.

Yes, a type of preview but at BOINCstats, there is a box, above the reply, that shows the preview as I type. A very nice feature as I do not have to click preview all the time and can do the corrections as soon as I complete my formatting.

-ChinookFöhn

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