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This one's about numbers: Rechenhaftigkeit [something like "computability", an expression by Max Weber] is everything in the age of shareholder value und computer technology. But it is also about people: after all, people have the unpleasant habit that – especially in bigger groups – they tend to stubborn behaviour that is not always controllable. And finally it is about aliens, but that's only a side effect.

Evaluating radio signals from outer space is an approach to search for extraterrestrial life. The basic thought: an extraterrestrial civilization being intelligent enough to transmit information via radio signals (but not intelligent enough to refrain from doing so – mankind is still in the latter stadium and watches Call-In-TV-Shows) would in principle be detectible if one succeeds in separating artificially generated signals from the cosmic background noise. If you want to explore a big section of the sky and a larger frequency spectrum, this turns out to be a computationally demanding task which cannot be accomplished by a single computer no matter what size it ever be. That is why the public Seti@home project was created at the University of California in Berkeley in 1999 which sends out small work units to the computers of volunteers all over the world over the internet. Today, this project has got nearly half a million more or less active participants that execute around 175 Billion [Trillion in the U.S.] floating point operations per second (175 Teraflops) with some one million computers attached to the project (numbers are from BOINCstats). To give the users a sense of the work accomplished, the project keeps count of their stats. In the beginning this included just counting the number of completed work units for each user; meanwhile, a variable number of "credits" is assigned that depends on the amount of work necessary to complete the unit. Statistics pages enable users to follow their own progress or the one of their team over the elapsed time. It sure is fun to watch one's own credit accumulate and to overtake others in the overall ranking; the competitive element drives the users' commitment. Und here's where the problems start.

SETI credits do not mean anything in the "real world": they are insubstantial, you cannot eat them and you cannot buy anything with them at all. They are just abstract numbers (and defined in a pretty complicated way). This does not keep a certain species of technology lovers and overclockers from gathering whole computer farms for the sole purpose of crunching for SETI (and other distributed computing projects based on Berkeley's open BOINC platform), to keep up in the electronic dick length comparison. If you follow the respective fora, you cannot quite help but feel that for some people hunting for credits means a vital purpose in their lives. The science done using their calculations has become practically irrelevant.

In Organizational Sociology it is a well known phenomenon, that over time the original goals of an organization will stand back behind internal goals of that organization. As long as the race for credits leads to more and more scientific work being done, this is unproblematic. A few weeks ago however a new version of the SETI software was released that scrutinizes work units more thoroughly and which requires more processor time to do so – and which changes the way credits are calculated as well. Under certain circumstances you will now get less credits per time unit. In any case, the "Recent Average Credit" will be affected, a measure of particular popularity among competitive participants; maybe it is because it is calculated abstractly enough to almost say nothing at all anymore. Loud laments were heard on the message boards, single voices of reason were lost in it. It was already then that the idea of a strike was coined to emphasize the demand for more valuable credits: the volunteers achieving the most for the project (and who suffered from the new credit system more than the average user) must not be the ones punished; the project team would have to yield to the demands of their participants they were after all depending on! In fact, the operators at Berkeley sometimes have trouble handling the big number of volunteers and their group dynamics. The neglect shown in the missing fostering of participants after the final switch from "classic" SETI (where over five million users had registered) to the BOINC platform at the end of 2005 is actually legendary, even if communication has improved since then.

Now finally a rather obscure reason for going on strike has been found: a voluntary developer is fed up after, among other things, being publicly and tenaciously accused of cheating by another user. The fight was – as you'll already have anticipated – over credits. Since midnight (UTC) on Monday some of the biggest teams are (if all went well) on strike for a week. In the message boards the sparks are flying vividly: mutual name-calling between "credit whores" and members of the "zero crew", who'd like it best if there were no distracting credits at all has become the usual business and mods are in action busily. As a number of users have noted regarding the kindergarden-like culture of discussions: One can only hope that the extraterrestrials being the original purpose of the search do not read the fora too. If mankind is that way, there would be any reason to not want to be found at all.

Originally posted by David Fischer-Kerli on June 5th, 2006
Translation by Dr. Christoph Jansen (many thanks), with some errors added by me