P REGUNTAS DE R ESPUESTA O RAL EN C OMISIÓN

all get together and switch over computing power from all projects to that one that needs it. And being a very stats driven team, not having stats for a few days (not once but a lot of times) has led to people leaving climateprediction.net and joining another project’ (Interview cpdn-c/2)

In other words, the primary reason for choosing a particular project for a stampede is not whether the project offers the opportunity for contributing to science, but rather to compete with other teams. The quotation also clearly links this to the stability and reliability of the project’s credit system: if it breaks down or does not update scores regularly, then team members may no longer be motivated to continue participating in that particular project and are liable to switch to another project. This is used to explain why a number of DPC members left the climateprediction.net project (and why there have not been any Stampedes targeting climateprediction.net since 2009) – it is not due to DTC members questioning their support for climate science or whether their participation in the project is genuinely contributing to the project’s scientific goals, but because the project’s credit system did not satisfy their urges to compete against other teams.

At the level of competition within the team, the credit system of a particular project can also be seen to be important for retaining individual team members. Within the DPC team, members can form subteams which compete against each other, and league tables comparing subteam credit scores for each major BOINC-based project are posted regularly on the DPC forums. This also motivates individual members to continue to participate in a particular project, as well as encourage them to recruit others to join their subteam and thus to participate in that project, as the following quotation from one of my interviews explains:

178 Extract 7.3: ‘I am involved in a community battle for the most CPU power so that drives us to the max. My friends and parents all donate their spare CPU time to climateprediction.net, and to my account, so I'll have a high output and we’ve reached a nice 4th position in our local ranking on DPC. My friends all love the stats, especially when we are high up’ (Interview cpdn-c/4)

Thus, it can be seen here that in the case of a project such as climateprediction.net, it is the competitive element engendered by the credit system and team system – rather than the potential to contribute to the project’s scientific goals – that has engaged some Team Crunchers in the Dutch Power Cows in the past, both in terms of the team competing the project’s league tables and also internal competition amongst DPC members. This accords to some extent with the findings of Holohan & Garg (2005). They argued that the large credit scores accumulated in BOINC-based projects by volunteers involved in teams resulted from ‘co-opetition’, namely that competition took place within a BOINC-based project amongst teams, and that individuals within a team would cooperate in order to improve their team’s performance. Such cooperation would involve posting messages in the forums in the team’s website encouraging or urging other team members to improve their performance, offering technical support and advice to other team members regarding the running of BOINC work units, and getting team members to target a particular project at a particular time in order to improve the team’s ranking (analogous to the Stampede discussed above).

My findings support this to some extent, suggesting that Team Crunchers are indeed primarily motivated by improving their team’s performance in league tables. They may well be interested in contributing to science, and indeed may restrict the projects they will get involved with according to their personal assessments of projects’ scientific value, however they are willing to switch their focus from one project to another if the team’s interests demand it (e.g. for a stampede). However, my findings also suggest that these Team Crunchers do not necessarily totally subsume their personal identities to their team identities, and that competition can be found within teams. Indeed, it suggests a form of nested co-opetition in the sense that, within a team, sub-teams can form which compete with each other and within which, members can cooperate to improve their sub-team’s position relative to others: all these factors can contribute, ultimately, to increasing the amount of computer processing capacity donated to BOINC-based projects.

However, Super-Crunchers are only one group, and my studies of these volunteers have revealed other groups of volunteers for whom, despite not being motivated by the credit and statistics systems, these systems have nevertheless played an important role in their online lives in climateprediction.net.

179 7.2.3 Alpha-Testers: Credits and statistics as a tool in boundary work

The vast majority of climateprediction.net volunteers participate in up to a handful of other BOINC projects, and these projects tend to be well-established, having already passed through alpha and beta testing phases. By contrast, the Alpha-Testers are often involved with 15, 20 or even more than 30 BOINC projects, many of which are in an alpha or beta testing phase, or they are regularly involved in the alpha testing phases of new features of climateprediction.net. Such individuals are very valuable to BOINC projects in a number of ways.

The Alpha-Testers often come from technical and scientific backgrounds, involving fields relevant to climate science (such as meteorology, or environmental science). They usually state that they have degrees in scientific disciplines, and careers that involved extensive computer programming or hardware development. This is exemplified in the following quotation from an interviews with an Alpha-Tester:

Extract 7.4: ‘As a former US Air Force Weather Forecaster, I've long had an interest in weather and related topics -- including climate. My association with computers began in 1964, with mainframes. In the first half of my USAF career, I was involved in weather reconnaissance before satellites, and a few years of that involved flying into Typhoons -- an exciting and very interesting way to earn a dollar! Most of the second half of the career was involved with mainframe computers at the USAF Global Weather Central’ (Interview cpdn-b/3)

It certainly seems that the Alpha-Testers are not motivated by the acquisition of credits or the prestige accrued from other statistics (such as the number of climate models completed) – after all, their involvement in CCPs tends to be spread over a large number of projects, rather than specialising in a smaller number, and furthermore, credits at the alpha and beta stages of development are rather unstable (as a project’s developers might modify the policies governing the awarding of credit as they refine the project for public launch). Indeed, in my interviews with the Alpha-Testers, they consistently sought not only to say that they were personally uninterested in project statistics but to actively distance themselves from this, and from people who might be motivated by this. One Alpha-Tester stated: ‘I find the chasing of meaningless statistics utterly offensive’ (Interview cpdn-b/3) (Extract 7.5), whilst another went into greater depth about their apparent contempt for those who are supposedly motivated by improving their statistics:

Extract 7.6: ‘For a short time, I joined the Pacific Northwest team but dropped out when it became