A modest proposal -- that the Community Admins be given the power to bind or loose. I suspect that is in the works, but right now all that we have is the power to post in a private forum to ask questions of the staff. Everything is still being organized. I expect that eventually we will be given a set of guidelines, rather than just armed with superpowers and turned loose to vanquish evil.

So, I have 4 wishes:
1) That the ISB will break its silence, so that we can finally begin to speak about our first project in other than hypothetical terms. [Right now we can be stampeded by rumors without solid facts to cling to.]
2) That the Community Admins can organize and make this message board a useful aid for members who need help. [Graham and David Autumns both are presenting very useful suggestions. Cheers!]
3) That once we are ready for a big influx, we begin a publicity drive to enroll many new members.
4) That a new Agent be designed that will make installation problems easier to diagnose. [Yes, it is going to be for Linux users, who tend to be very knowledgeable, but eventually some evolved version will be ported back to Windows. This untraditional 4th wish is a long term wish.]

On a slightly more serious note...

My personal viewpoint is that, it is not a good thing for any forums admin to be a member of any team. As admin should always be seen to be scrupulously impartial, it is difficult to see how that can be when any admin member may also be a member of a team that is in direct competition with one's own team. It is a matter of there being a possible conflict of interests. It would seem wise to nip this in the bud 'before' the problem arises.

Hi Hairy4Paws, Hi Arwen Evenstar

Let me just put your mind to rest on this one.

Community Admins are just normal members who are here to help everyone on the WCG because at the end of the day we are all one big team at WCG.

Our "powers" extend to the right to put together posts for the Community Based FAQ's and that's it. We have access to a forum where we can post questions to the crew at IBM and we try to represent you (the whole WCG Team) as ordinary members, feeling the same pains as yourself, to IBM.

Community Admins are invited by the WCG to be Community Admins as a result of the help and assistance that those ordinary members - just like you - have provided in the forum. So we are just mad WCG helpers. Sorry, but sometimes we can't help ourselves helping

As an ordinary member and as a Team Captain of a team I, and all the team members, have nurtured and spent countless hours building our little team up to a massive 40 members. If we had special "powers" would we need to cajole family members and work colleagues to join the gang! 3 of our 40 members live in this house for example, the family Autumns. Our 6 new members today well I work with them and the poor souls have been badgered into signing up to MOT. We have 47,427 members today on the World Community Grid - my little team contains just 40 of them and I'm one of them! So there's still 47, 387 potential team members out there up for grabs. Even all of my team members could become your team members if they were not happy to continue to crunch with MOT.

The "best supported team on the WCG" started as a joke when we were a team of about 10 and posting a handful of points everyday. The reason being we already had on board myself, Lawrence Hardin and Dave Bell - prolific members on the forum.

So we are hardly signing up every new member joining the WCG with our insider info! Good job too otherwise I wouldn't have time to go to work and earn my living if I had to do all the admin that the my online team website requires as each new member signs up.

btw - We do have 4 Community Admins in "my online team" the reason behind this is we kept bumping into each other while assisting members in the forum in the early days - before we were ever Community Admins so naturally we teamed up as we became friends. The WCG is great for that, I now have friends all over the world.

We all joined my online team as mere mortal WCG members. We are now just mere mortal Community Admins and as you can see we have the best wishes of all members of the WCG at heart.

I'm sure I speak for all CA's, but if I could help anyone on the forum where I had an answer to their difficulty I would, while I have some time to give to this project - Just read any of our posts. I'm sure you would soon realise that this is the case.

Just keep on crunching for WCG the output of the HPF project will provide the foundations for research into treatments for many of Mankind’s ailments – remember that is what this is really all about.

Just beware, Crunching for WCG is addictive!

All the best

Dave

I realized that -- didn't I see a big grin smiley ( ) in your post?