zoran Lv 1
You may well be right that all effects of this sponsored competition may be harmful. If so, the conclusion will be obvious and we will not do it again, at least until we figure out a more effective thing to try. I will guarantee you that we will not pursue any path that shows indications of being harmful to the long term objectives of Foldit.
One thing I'd like to point out is that Foldit has matured from its toddler stage, in many ways is on the radar of many scientific efforts, many disease foundations, efforts to involve more people into science. We have a number of non-profit foundations offering different kinds of ways to contribute to Foldit. We even have parents with children who suffer from rare protein-related diseases asking about how to donate money so that we can focus on the specific scientific problem. We now have more scientists with their own research funding wanting to get involved. I'm still not sure what we should do with these opportunities? Should we turn everything down? Is there a way to effectively use such funding to make Foldit bigger and better scientific discovery framework. I'd like to think so, but it will take us a while to figure it out, just as Foldit took 2 years to be effective, and we know that it can be drastically more effective still. One thing that is clear to me is that we need to involve the Foldit community in figuring out this process. I will organize a virtual brainstorming conference with all interested Foldit players with the goal to devise guidelines for this process.
regarding the provision that money be used for education only: i actually inserted that provision as the rules were drafted and i thought that it was important. In the end there was no way to effectively enforce that such money be spent on education only, and we had to remove that clause. Personally I would have preferred a choice of a charity to donate to, but that required a lot of time, and many additional things to work out. I think in the future we will stay away from direct monetary prizes.
It is certainly up to you whether you want to participate in the all-Foldit-player version of that puzzle that will follow the University competition. We would like to see how different the results would be across many metrics when comopared to the university challenge. But certainly abstaining from the competition would be equally important part of that information.
