Co-opetition Strategy in Volunteer Computing: The Example of Collaboration Online in BOINC.RU Community

摘要

Volunteer computing (VC) is a strong way to harness distributed computing resources to perform large-scale scientific tasks. Its success directly depends on the number of participants, PC (some other devices) and time of their work. And while the computational aspect received much effective research attention and solutions; the social problem of VC phenomenon – how persuade the owners of widely dispersed smart machines and devices to participate in VC projects, and how figure out ways to speed and expand the capability of donated computer resources, remains largely unexplored. We think that a motive of self-actualization of participants of volunteer computing is not enough to explain why millions of unskilled people day by day participate in scientific computation. Our research indicates that the answer lies at the intersection of self-oriented motivation and the interactional, organizational possibilities emerging through the Internet. In this paper we investigate Russian community of VC and discuss the suggestion that online collaboration can capture people`s motivation better than only intrinsic motives.