Right now we are subsidizing the less popular projects by giving them the same weighting as popular projects. This is an important role for Gridcoin to play and we should not completely throw out the baby with the bathwater. However, at the same time projects with more scientific merit should be given a bigger share of resources IMO. If we apply some type of multiplier/weighting factor (2x, 3x, for example) for top scientific and well administrated projects maybe that would be enough to incentive the top performing science projects while avoiding poaching too many from less popular projects.
Thinking about a ranking system, it should be dynamic and ever changing since projects run out of WUs all the time. Perhaps a voting screen could be placed on the gridcoin wallet startup screen in order to encourage people to vote, and vote frequently. Perhaps all rankings could reset after a period of time in order to keep things fresh.
I do love the idea of calculators etc. and I think it should be doable on a per project basis. It may get messy when it comes to comparing cross project.
Also just thought of another idea just to throw out there: What if you could burn gridcoins in order to purchase a temporary boost to your vote. This could open the door for commercial boinc projects.
I think it either you believe in the project or you are in just for profit. people contributed to BOINC because they believe in it without compensation. why should we change that?
I think that there should be some incentive to have more computational resources devoted to projects that are scientifically the most successful.
@ilikechocolate raises a good point that there is already an unofficial ranking of projects in that some are more lucrative than others (either due to special hardware requirements or popularity). Or purely due to popularity, some projects are more competitive than others, which is another type ranking.
I think there is a good argument to be made that we should rank projects on a variety of factors including the above but scientific/social impact as well.
I think we should change our whitelisting process. For me. if it pass the whitelisting they are all equal in value. just choose which suites you. money or the scientific goal.
so if a boinc project want to tap on the grc community they should up thier standard. so in this case. all projects that are whitelisted have thier merits. and thus all proejct are in eqaul value.