In my opinion, this is going to be a "tough sell" to major corporations. First, there will be the additional power consumption as a result of the BOINC software (couple of amps times as many as 8000 to 10000 machines). This will be significant addition to the expense budget. Secondly, those amps get converted to heat. That heat has to be dealt with presumably with additional air conditioning which is also an add expense. Thirdly, I would think it should be prudent to assume that a percentage of a company's machines will succumb to the heat and need to be replaced which adds to the companies expenses. If that company happens to be in a regulated industry it would be an even tougher sell as they possibly wouldn't be able to recover those expenses in their rate structures which means it would be attributed to shareholders. As long as the company was willing to assume those added expenses in a spirit of charity or philanthropy fine. I don't think you will find many willing to do so..

Just a few thoughts...

Thanks for starting this discussion, and thanks to those who have contributed so far. As World Community Grid's new-ish communications person, I'd love to see everyone's ideas.

We have some plans in the works, but volunteers are typically our best recruiters.

I use the argument that with each successive generation of computers we get, they are more power efficient, the power use gets lower and lower, so using WCG doesn't really add anything for the cost for us. We are also purchasing the Micro sized Dell PCs and they only have a 45W processor, they don't even get close to 100W at full load.

@sartaonline, What you are describing is a starting point for power. I agree with your premise but regardless of the generation of the hardware, BOINC will add additional power usage. It's that delta that is the item of concern. The CIO is likely to say that you are right is saying that the company can save money by using newer hardware but just think how much more it could save by NOT running BOINC.

Not to change the subject, but my idea is a little bit outside of the current theme. I would think that another way to add more interest is to have some kind of graphic (that updates at the end of day) that shows the percentage of the project complete.

We already have them under the research page, but it seems like it gets only update when major news comes from a project. I am assuming that WCG or the researchers give a number of units that they want to crunch and as we get closer a graph showing the number of units left would be a good way of getting volunteers to feel like they are getting somewhere close.

This is already being done for MCM as a sort of weekly update and I love it because I can get to see the trend going steadily down.

I know that it is difficult to put this in place (give WCG's resources), but if there was some sort of daily (or even weekly) update showing how many work units are left for each project that would help current/potential volunteers see that they are actively getting those units done. These info graphics can also be posted on Facebook so that at least the community knows that a lot of work is being done. And if work units are continuously added that is okay as well since this shows researchers are actively looking through the work being produced and adding more. This sort of feature is available from a lot of BOINC projects as a server status page.

However giving the user some sort of a estimate by how much their electric rates will go up (even if that information has to be inputted) would help attract new members as they don't have to guess how much more electricity it will take up.