>>174-177,192 Q1 Team 2ch is formed by the thousands of member who frequently access to the largest Internet forum in Japan, “2channel” (2ちゃんねる, www.2ch.net/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel ). There are over several hundreds of sub-forums called “board” covering specific genres, and hundreds of thread are posted for each board and being discussed. We have variety of members join in the team; each 2channel users has his/her own interests, and there weren’t anything we have in common within the members besides the fact that we all access 2ch.net. Since each of us has different objectives for BOINC/WCG as well, we cannot really answer why each of us runs BOINC programs and do the grid computing. However, one thing we could really say for sure, is that we join Team 2ch for a single motto: “For the smile we haven’t seen yet.”
Q2 Formerly some of us worked (and still work) at different grid-computing projects. Grid.org, in particular, was working for the project to help conquering cancer, which is one of the top causes of death in Japan. There are a lot of people in Japan who lost their relatives and friends by cancer. This may explain the reason why we’re becoming united. This project was very popular all over Team 2ch, and we kept holding the title of being the largest team for the credits earned there. However, as some of you may know, grid.org ended its research 2 years ago (in April 2007). We chose World Community Grid as our next field to stay focusing on; where several “medical” researches are being operated in distributed-computation just like grid.org. Here, our rival team Easynews since grid.org, was holding the #1 team title in WCG. We also noticed that there are several different projects working at the same time, in which most of them were pretty far, far away from their completion. Thanks to the website language localized in Japanese, its easy process in order to install applications, and the stability of core client, we currently have over 9,500 members crunching the works.
Q3 We have set up the Wiki webpages spoken in our language (http://team2ch.info/) to guide the newcomers for WCG and other BOINC projects. There are some volunteers who introduced WCG and solicit to join our team by creating video clips. We’ve also built several frameworks to keep up members’ motivation: One of them to create sub-team system, where we compete against each boards within Team 2ch by joining one of the sub-team you’d like to belong with. The another is developed by our great statistician we have in Team 2ch called “Daily-Bulletin” that’ll gave us the list of the name of members, points they’ve earned, work completed and their run-time optimized for each boards. Each boards in 2channel has a thread about the grid-computation; volunteers report the Bulletin and we discuss all sorts of things everyday (these answers were also being argued, organized and translated as well). We have members who are very enthusiastic to talk about these topics, and some of us really aren’t, but we’ve reached the conclusion that being in any attitudes are totally fine.
Q4 We hope the reputation of World Community Grid will rise over Japanese community and join even more members by having the newest project from Japan (Help Fight Childhood Cancer) you’ve just launched. In fact, lots of Japanese media broadcasted about WCG HFCC project when they started. We are glad that we see the result and all the informations of the research on Japanese website. We all support the WCG projects, especially HFCC, and hope greatly to look forward for the projects to be accomplished on one day.
Q5 We were about to lost our goal with the last announcement from grid.org in 2007. World Community Grid gave us the way out to run again with your well-prepared language localization and its stabilized server operation. We would like to appreciate all the World Community Grid advisory board members and staffs for giving us to contribute for the future throughout the world.