I think if you posted your personal list of tasks here instead of asking people to e-mail you first, you would have an easier time getting people to help. People might think “oh, I don’t want to embarass myself / waste lukeprog’s time by e-mailing him if there’s a chance I wouldn’t get around doing those things”. Yet if they knew what your tasks were, they might find that they could quite easily do some of them.
My thought is that requiring potential volunteers to email me will filter out those least likely to actually do something. Also, I want to be able to coordinate who is working on what so that uselessly duplicate work isn’t being done.
Can’t you filter the volunteers by first posting the list, then requiring that the people who want to work on any of the things mentioned e-mail you? My intuition would be that your current method filters out a disproportionate amount of people who would actually do things.
Actually, the single most valuable thing that anyone could do to boost my research productivity right now would be to email me [luke@intelligence.org] the username and password they use to download behind-paywall papers from home via their university’s proxy server. Somebody did this for me earlier but their account expired a few days ago (they had already graduated), and now the pace of my research is significantly hampered as a result.
Well, you have mine for what it’s worth. (I’m afraid I don’t really know much about the mechanics of database access- do you need to know the university name, or what?)
Edit: If anyone out there is in a good university with access to a lot of science databases, don’t hold off on my account.
I think if you posted your personal list of tasks here instead of asking people to e-mail you first, you would have an easier time getting people to help. People might think “oh, I don’t want to embarass myself / waste lukeprog’s time by e-mailing him if there’s a chance I wouldn’t get around doing those things”. Yet if they knew what your tasks were, they might find that they could quite easily do some of them.
My thought is that requiring potential volunteers to email me will filter out those least likely to actually do something. Also, I want to be able to coordinate who is working on what so that uselessly duplicate work isn’t being done.
Can’t you filter the volunteers by first posting the list, then requiring that the people who want to work on any of the things mentioned e-mail you? My intuition would be that your current method filters out a disproportionate amount of people who would actually do things.
Actually, the single most valuable thing that anyone could do to boost my research productivity right now would be to email me [luke@intelligence.org] the username and password they use to download behind-paywall papers from home via their university’s proxy server. Somebody did this for me earlier but their account expired a few days ago (they had already graduated), and now the pace of my research is significantly hampered as a result.
Well, you have mine for what it’s worth. (I’m afraid I don’t really know much about the mechanics of database access- do you need to know the university name, or what?)
Edit: If anyone out there is in a good university with access to a lot of science databases, don’t hold off on my account.
Yeah, thanks, your access is much better than nothing!
Is anyone at a major university feeling generous?