A 'BOINC-wide team' is one that teams that exist on all BOINC projects, present and future, with an identical name and founder email address.

[snip]

1. Create an account and a team on this site. If you already have a team on one or more BOINC projects, use the exact same team name and email address.

[snip]

The list of teams and accounts on this site is periodically imported by each BOINC project. Teams and accounts that don't already exist on that project are added. If the team exists and is owned by you (i.e. its founder has the same email address), then its URL, description etc. are updated.

[snip]

* The email address and team name you use on this site should never be changed (if you change them, you'll need to manually change them on every BOINC project in order for updates to work). Pick an email address that won't go away any time soon.

[snip]

Our team has many founders, and I think that's fine. A founder should be someone who really crunches for the project, not just someone who has some whatever position in a team.

The above quoted lines suggest that the future dealing should be something centralist, with one head honcho and a lot of servants, that's not my idea of a good management.

We are considering a central mail address atm, something more than just one person has access to, but imho it will still be just the starter, afterwards the founder will probably go to someone personal, who crunches in this project and is responsible for keeping the team description up to date.

BTW, team description is of course something else in all projects, not some prefab airy-fairy one-size-fits-all. That's may be a good starter for new projects, until you have the time to customise it, but not for updating it once in a while. It should be different on all projects.

So, on one hand it seems like a fine idea to have the name SETI.Germany kind of copyrighted in new projects from the beginning, but any update should just be a voluntarily option, something to suppress for teams that don't want such a uniformity, that are a bit more diverse.

How is this handled?
How are teams with diverse founders, that want to stay so, handled with the described updates?

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

I suspect I may be the only, or one of the few, members of my team (Catalunya) who know about this. There are multiple founders. They are mostly interested in organising group talks, meetings and dinners in sunny and elegant or historical places. When I've worked out in my own mind what would have to be done to change things, I may consider asking them about it.

The advantage of becoming a BOINC-wide team is, as you say, having the team name reserved in advance on new projects. As the number of projects grows, this aspect will become more important.

Anyone of the developers with an answer to my question?

How is this BOINC-wide teams list supposed to work with multi-founder teams?

And what is suposed to happen with customised team descriptions for each project? I fail to see a click box "Do update team profile on existing teams yes/no"

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

How is this BOINC-wide teams list supposed to work with multi-founder teams?

Not. Only one team founder per team is possible through there. Or you use the all-in-one email address as the workaround.
Else, don't use BOINC Teams.

And what is suposed to happen with customised team descriptions for each project? I fail to see a click box "Do update team profile on existing teams yes/no"

They get overwritten if you use the teams option. Only the description you have on here will be used. As it says:

"The list of teams and accounts on this site is periodically imported by each BOINC project. Teams and accounts that don't already exist on that project are added. If the team exists and is owned by you (i.e. its founder has the same email address), then its URL, description etc. are updated."

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So there is no use for this "feature" for the second bigest team in BOINC, SETI.Germany.

To keep the same founder address may be usable, even for bigger teams, if some fake account is used to which more than one member have access, but the team description has to be project individual, not some boring, nonsensical, blah-blah without specialities for this project.

We have 28 founders on the BOINC projects, and we have a different description on all projects, with a standard part and some custom part in it. This has to stay this way, diversity is better than uniformity. If this "feature" will one day mess with our teams presentation, I think we will get unpleasant.

Who led this half-baked "feature" lose on the public?

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

If there's a BOINC-wide team X with founder Y,
then on new projects team X will be created with founder Y.
Team X on existing projects (possibly with different founders)
won't be changed.
-- David

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So, on one hand it seems like a fine idea to have the name SETI.Germany kind of copyrighted in new projects from the beginning...

It doesn't even do that. Consider this scenario:

New project, where membership is still invitation only. Team Foo is automatically created, yet no team members from Foo can join at this time. So random person Bar decides to hijack the team by initiating the transfer request.

Oh yeah, and the default founder no longer exists, as is the case for my own team. How he got set up as the default team founder is a mystery to me and my team. I am guessing the default teams were simply copied from SETI, where he is also founder.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

Who led this half-baked "feature" lose on the public?

Half-baked is too kind.

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

I've asked for a transparent team description option, or an option to check/uncheck if you want the description to propagate to other projects.

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Oh yeah, and the default founder no longer exists, as is the case for my own team. How he got set up as the default team founder is a mystery to me and my team. I am guessing the default teams were simply copied from SETI, where he is also founder.

Same here, fortunately he changed his email address to the one of our former homepage admin (who isn't in this position any longer, but still has contact to the current admins). I don't think Chris has voluntarily set up this team here, it was just copied and pasted from Seti without asking the founders about this.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

(Aside)
I don't think the Catalans are ready for This yet, or This for the Catalans. Like Manuel in Fawlty Towers they would all say 'Qué??????'.

I've asked for a transparent team description option, or an option to check/uncheck if you want the description to propagate to other projects.

For now, BOINC-wide teams will have the same description on all projects. Changing this is possible but not right now.

-- David

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I've asked for a transparent team description option, or an option to check/uncheck if you want the description to propagate to other projects.

For now, BOINC-wide teams will have the same description on all projects. Changing this is possible but not right now.

-- David

Who decided that this boring uniformity had to be the only option?

And why were the founders not asked about this, as Chris was most definitely not?

This is another fine example of a "feature" hastily implemented, not really thought through, but thrust on the unprepared public before testing and debugging. Fortunately most projects haven't yet implemented this piece of crap in the server code.

Edith says:
I think I'll open a new ticket about this bug.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

Edith says:
I think I'll open a new ticket about this bug.

My ticket was closed by davea with the ridiculous remark about some dubious google group. WTF has this data mining company to do with this project? Google is no serious provider, they are just an information sucker without any sense of privacy.

Ain't this or the different mailing lists and project fora the only valid discussion places? Using google devaluates the merit of this enterprise quite considerably.

If this was discussed in this shady back room on google, I have no doubt that no good could have come out of that.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

My ticket was closed by davea with the ridiculous remark about some dubious google group. WTF has this data mining company to do with this project? Google is no serious provider, they are just an information sucker without any sense of privacy.

Ain't this or the different mailing lists and project fora the only valid discussion places? Using google devaluates the merit of this enterprise quite considerably.

Using Google Groups would be a good idea if they actually provided something more than what we already have. But nope; this forum has far more features than Google Groups. The main advantage of newsgroups vs web forums is having them accessible offline and without a browser; advantages that were stripped out by Google's web interface.

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From the dubious Google-group, probably by David Anderson, as long as it's not here or in the trac I can't say for sure:

I'm preparing to add a "team admin" feature.
The current plan is as follows; please review and comment.

- A team founder can select members of that team as "admins"
(if an admin quits the team, he/she ceases to be an admin)
- An admin of a team can:
- edit its name/URL/description/type/country
- remove members
- view the member list (w/ email addrs)
- An admin cannot:
- change the founder, or accept a change-founder request
- add or remove admins

-- David

What is this dubious group about? It's not a proper place for discussions. It's now readable without surrendering your privacy to the "Datenkrake" Google, but it's definitely no proper place for discussions about BOINC.

There is this official forum to talk about such stuff or the dev-list, full stop. Everything else is just BS.

How should this be implemented?
Will it be possible to join teams on the BOINC-wide team page in the future?
Can a founder transfer be made then?
Will there be an option to keep different descriptions for different projects?
How will multi-founder teams have to use this feature?

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

What is this dubious group about? It's not a proper place for discussions. It's now readable without surrendering your privacy to the "Datenkrake" Google, but it's definitely no proper place for discussions about BOINC.

There is this official forum to talk about such stuff or the dev-list, full stop. Everything else is just BS.

It sure does appear like smoke-filled, back-room decisions are being made. It appears that *some* team founders were invited to join this google group, created by David Anderson, back in July. I assume the list of invited founders was taken from the S@H list of team founders. My team was not invited, probably because my team's S@H founder no longer exists. In any case, that the discussion was hidden, and not here or the mailing list is more than a bit frustrating. Or did I miss an announce about this group somewhere official?

I did find this bit of official documentation:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/TeamDiscussion

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

I did find this bit of official documentation:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/TeamDiscussion

I even found some more information there in the change log:

	It would be nice if teams were actually BOINC-wide. 
6	 	How do we deal with the situation where the same team name exists 
7	 	on different projects with different owners? 
8	 	 
9	 	 * Should teams be BOINC-wide rather than project specific? 
10	 	 * If so, how to resolve current inconsistencies? 
11	 	 * Should people be able to belong to different teams on different projects? 
12	 	 
13	 	Conclusion (implemented as of 25 July 2007): 
14	 	 * Create a [http://boinc.berkeley.edu/teams/ web site for registering BOINC-wide teams]. 
15	 	 * In case of dispute over a name, the oldest instance of the team on an existing project wins. 
16	 	 * Write an "export" script to export the list of teams and founders as XML. Include "previous founder" field. 
17	 	 * Write an "update" script that downloads these files.
                   For each team: if it doesn't exist, create it, and create user account.
                   If founder in DB is previous founder in XML, change founder. Update other team fields (URL etc.). 
18	 	 * Newly-created projects to use the update script (e.g. put in config.xml). 
19	 	 * Resolve current inconsistencies manually; I will encourage project admins to help. 

It was deleted from the page by:

Author:
davea (IP: 130.75.117.49)
Timestamp:
09/13/07 02:01:53 (2 months ago)

All real changes up to today were made by davea, so it's not really a discussion but a monologue.


Edith says:
I've looked in the dev_list at about that time, I didn't find any hint about it in the logs. I think it was never ever properly discussed, just implemented like some few users wanted it.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

David Anderson was active again without using the proper means of communication but the shady back room. He has changed the team founder possibilities, and implemented this already on Seti, SetiBeta and BOINC Alpha:

Team founders can nominate Admins, who can change team description and such. They have access to the email addresses of the team members as well (something the users were not aware of while signing to the team, imho a breach of privacy).

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

David Anderson was active again without using the proper means of communication but the shady back room. He has changed the team founder possibilities, and implemented this already on Seti, SetiBeta and BOINC Alpha.

He didn't even ask other projects about the ideas, or other developers about the implementation. Then that's why I read "Things we didn't get around to: BOINC protocols as Internet standards" and fall off chair laughing.

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