The BOINC Census is a yearly effort aimed at finding out who uses BOINC, what they like about it, and what changes they want to see in the future. Filling out the census is a great way to support this project, the wider BOINC community, and have your input heard for future bug bounties. The census is sponsored by the Science Commons Initiative, and the results will be published in an aggregate, anonymized fashion at the completion of the census. Please take 5 minutes to fill out the census at https://app.fillout.com/flow/esDGuRswWfus

Curious to see what the outcome of the census is, I've always wondered about how people know about boinc etc

Thanks for telling me about this. Hopefully more people will find out about Boinc. Almost everyone I meet has never heard of it.

An update from the Science Commons Initiative: BOINC Census Released!

I'd like to point out the fact most people will hate to hear, but ALL Boinc usage (along with all electric car usage) is actually fossil fuels. Yes that's right, your electric car is not helping the environment one bit. Think about it. Imagine no electric cars. x% of our power is renewable and is ALL being used. (100-x)% has to be filled in by fossil fuels. Now add an extra load on the grid - electric cars or Boinc or that stupid Bitcoin. There's no unused renewable to feed it. So they have to crank up the fossil fuel generation.

Even if you have solar panels, where would that power go if you didn't use it yourself for Boinc? You'd sell it to the grid, who would use it in place of fossil fuels. So by you running Boinc, they have to generate more fossil fuel power for someone else.

I still use Boinc anyway (8 computers flat out 24/7) - the science is worth it (well most projects are, the maths is very questionable).

Electric cars will be good once all power generation is renewable, since petrol cars can never be clean. But at the moment, they're not helping (apart from reducing local pollution).

As for the sentence in the report "....it appears we have a lot of work to do ..... on the emissions side of BOINC" - you can't. To do that you need to get the power companies to make more renewable resources, which is nothing to do with Boinc, it's an international thing.

As for the importance of Boinc, I'm running my GPUs on Folding@Home outside Boinc, because Boinc has very little in the way of useful projects for GPUs. AFAIK there are two astrophysics projects and a load of maths ones. Folding can do biology, so why can't Boinc?

81% not supporting a project non-financially is illogical. Either they didn't understand the question, or most people are using the electricity and computers at their work/school/university. I find it hard to believe that's 81%.