To whom it may concern:
I have received some questions as to whether I will be going to or helping to plan Eternacon 2017, and so as not to repeat the same thing many times, I will provide an update to all of the community at the same time. Feel free to ignore or disregard my opinion on this matter in favor of your own better opinions - this is just for those who want to know.
Thank You
Firstly I thank each and every one of you for all the work you have done for the project. Please do be sure to put your health, school, family, and work first when managing your time here. Volunteering is an important part of social duty, and something I have done all my life. But I do see a worrying trend for companies to depend too much on volunteer labor when they should be paying for the proper community & platform maintenance.
Unlike some companies, Eterna I do believe suffers from a lack of labor simply due to being small, and not taking on investors who could exploit our work or cause other problems. So one price to pay for our independence is a lack of funds for things like development and operations. ( Please do immediately correct me if I am wrong, and some magical plan is in the works to address these issues with verified talent on an explicit timeline with budget in hand. )
Work Smart Not Hard
Nonetheless, in the event that your personal duties here ever exceed that of enjoying yourself while playing a game for a reasonable number of hours a week, in ethical conscience I must state clearly to all of you, especially those who may be vulnerable financially, medically, socially, etc.: please be aware of the amount of time you spend working for others for free, and set limits appropriate to balancing your own needs in life.
Then, it will better the project when we spend what time we do have to volunteer as efficiently as possible, ( efficient according not to my opinion but to your own, since while I state my opinion here I do not assume I am correct ). I only hope that you do take efficiency for the project and reasonable limits for yourself into consideration when choosing tasks to take on for projects like this.
I say all of this thinking of course a bit of myself, in both having given much more time than I really had available to this project ( without regret, but with awareness of the sacrifice ), and also at the same time still speaking in favor of volunteering for citizen science. I am in favor of citizen science, Eterna’s mission, and volunteering. But I also feel a duty when I see people here taking on a lot of responsibility outside the scope of being a player of the game, to let you know that it is important to always set good boundaries to protect your own time and bandwidth.
Maybe you are managing your time very well and don’t need this heads up, but just in case I want to be sure to tell you all what I wish I would myself better pay attention to: that you also have to take care of yourself.
Eterna’s Mission Is a Noble Cause
That being said, Eterna’s mission in general is a noble cause, and any task you choose to do here will provide excellent experience and opportunity for helping others. So I will hope and assume that whatever task any of you choose to do with your time here, is also for your own benefit as much as Eterna’s.
Therefore, if any of you wish to plan and attend another Eternacon, that is very good in many ways, and I am happy for you. However with regard to time and money - both short for many in this economy, and short for this project in my current understanding - I also wish for you to look out for your own life duties, and for Eterna to be careful about prioritizing and spending time and resources wisely.
I say all of this *because* the mission is important, *because* I believe this research matters, this is precisely why I present some caution about how we spend our time and money.
Again, with the caveat that this is all just my own opinion, and if you disagree, I happily leave it to each of you to do as you wish.
What Is the Highest Priority?
Along these lines, and with full support of whatever your own wishes are, I feel that an Eternacon for 2017 is not the highest priority issue for myself.
Rather, the slow load times and overheating have prevented me from being able to play puzzles or do labs for going on 2 years now. So if this inaccessibility issue does not change, I do not see myself, and many other impatient potential players, able to participate.
Therefore, I would like to focus what time I have on resolving the major platform issues. And because resources are short, I can therefore only advocate for any Eterna resources to go towards shoring up the platform itself, and not towards a convention every year.
It’s a very lovely and nice tradition if we have the resources to manage it. If not… well. In my opinion, here we are. If there are others with the resources to make Eternacon happen anyway, or better yet in addition to resolving platform issues, then more power to you!
Platforms Must Also Evolve To Survive
Many of you have a great interest in technology and software, and may have observed various platforms evolve or stagnate over the years. In this timescape you can see how much maintenance a project requires to keep its community, research, and products viable and competitive.
So my opinion - and please take it with a grain of salt and follow your own conscience, as I am very fallible in my opinions - but in my opinion, since people are asking me, we may wish to not have an Eternacon this year, and instead focus all hands on deck and available resources on whatever fundraising or coding is needed to get the platform fixed.
It has been several years now that we have been preparing for a real overhaul since Jee left, and with the Crispr development, we really need our system to be more robust, and at a minimum not so slow that people like me cannot bear to use it, plus worries about frying machines. The people who have done work so far have done beautiful contributions with various initiatives that have improved aspects of the game, and we are grateful for that.
Have We Come to an Impasse?
However, it has not addressed the elephant in the room of flash being too clumsy for this project’s ideal implementation, or even day to day logins, much less navigation across massive amounts of data, much less actual design ability without endless and unpredictable intermittent loadtime waiting.
This is a bit of an impasse for me, so I am trying to brainstorm what I can for potential solutions, in the forum post titled How to Solve Major Platform Issues with Limited Resources. I will therein introduce any additional ideas I get for resolution paths:
https://getsatisfaction.com/eternagame/topics/how-to-solve-major-platform-issues-with-limited-resources
My #1 Priority Is to Focus On Major Platform Issues This Year
I am grateful that members of the community would offer to include me in talks for planning Eternacon, and if I change my mind I will speak up, but for now I think it is better left to those who passionately want to plan it and attend.
In my own case, I will be focusing all my available time on fixing these money/platform issues. Especially because I know you all managed last year’s convention entirely without my help, so I know you can manage on your own if you wish to do it, and do not need my help. I imagine it is only a kind courtesy that you asked me, but if you do find you are stuck with something, you can always ask me one-off questions, and I will answer as best I can. But anyway, as I said, I don’t imagine you need my help with this one, especially while these other issues appear to be going on and needing attention.
Don’t Be Discouraged - Ignore Me If You Disagree
Please don’t be discouraged from going ahead with the convention if it makes you all happy, that is great. I think for my part, it is only because I have to carefully manage my time, that I have to triage and decide what to do based on highest priority. So if everyone else has bandwidth to do Eternacon, I hope that you all please do so and have great fun.
It is only from my own perspective, seeing now what I did not understand at first joining, that Eterna is actually much smaller and less well funded than other major citizen science games, and if we are to reinvigorate the community and really take advantage of the miracle of Crispr, we must get the platform usable by modern standards. That is my own priority for now.
I Still Care, and You Will Do Fine Without Me
I do miss all of you, and wish I had the time to hang out more casually. I think if I were able to get back to what I originally fell in love with, which was designing molecules and solving puzzles, then I would be around more often simply due to the reward of it. I will still help as I can, but frankly, it’s become akin to work to me, and not the game I love and miss, which I feel I have been locked out of for quite some time now.
If after everything I have said here, you still feel I would be a useful contributor to various conversations, you can always invite me, and I will come if I can ( much of the time I probably cannot, so again, please don’t be discouraged, it’s nothing personal ). But I think perhaps my presence in such conversations would be a hindrance if your goal is to get Eternacon 2017 set up, you don’t need or want me to show up trying to talk you all out of it because of my own concerns.
Therefore please don’t invite me to convention planning sessions if everyone is intent on having Eternacon 2017, as I don’t want to be a distraction, and I will not be changing my mind until such time as the major platform issues are fixed.
Be Prepared Because Crispr, Zomg, Crispr!
Crispr is a game changer. The fact that we are at a point to integrate that in any capacity, is a fire lit under our platform issues that IMHO we must not ignore.
Look at Phylo, a great gene game no longer maintained and sadly lost to the entropic sands of time unless revived. Unless I am mistaken the mobile app just sends your hardwon data analysis into a black hole most of the time, and it isn’t even clear to me whether they are even still active on the other end. And if I understood match/categorizing species to be more important to humanity’s health I would look into it and help them. But as I see it, Eterna’s mission is more important. And thus, I have more concern over the platform itself not stalling out, when there is so much further on the horizon to go.
Therefore the best thing I think I can do with my own time, is to try to help ensure that Eterna’s platform evolves enough to survive in time for this Crispr rollout, by the way Crispr being in my opinion as important a discovery/invention as the wheel or the internet itself, and the biggest medical revolution since penicillin and washing your hands before surgery.
Summary
So with that being said:
- Thank you very kindly, but no thank you, I do not wish to help organize or attend Eternacon this year, unless some highly tangible benefit to the platform is involved, and even then, I don’t know, because hey, I’m shy.
- I do want to prioritize my time, energy, and resources into fixing the major platform issues. Because I am short on all those things, this does not leave me bandwidth for extra fun stuff like Eternacon.
- I do of course encourage you to pursue whatever aspect of this project resonates with you regardless of what I say, because a diversity of efforts is important to the health of any ecosystem/genepool/community/project.
And I hope that Rhiju or a dev can correct me if I am worrying unnecessarily about platform issues that will be fixed some time soon. I don’t know the current status of things myself.
If you do agree that we have limited resources, and that there is no actionable timeline for resolving these loadtimes and general platform upgrades, then please know that there are ways to address those issues, especially if we focus our time and resources on them as first priority.
And beyond addressing major platform issues, when and if I do find myself with more bandwidth, I may try to help with a blog post explaining the importance and magic of Crispr, someday go to Eternacon again, or ideally, when having the platform fixed, I will get back to puzzles and labs like I used to get to enjoy.
With all respect, gratitude, and care for each and every one of you, the mission, devs, scientists, and the community as a whole,
~ Machinelves