It's comforting, though none the less extremely galling, to know that I'm not the only person in this position. Let's hope that something comes out of the survey and subsequent focus groups to help us to improve this situation.

We don't typically announce that a project is wrapping up in Member News but have sometimes emailed members once a project has completed (so they can switch over to other projects).

But we are starting to think about our communication strategy overall: what to notify members of and how to communicate that information. So your feedback comes at a good time and we'll be taking this into account.

(1) Notification method
We've have a high threshold of what we communicate over email as we don't want to litter people's inboxes. Therefore an announcement that a project is ending is typically contained within the forums. But maybe we need to rethink that. You feel that such information is buried in the forums and you shouldn't be expected to sift through the forums on a regular basis. That's a fair comment. We're starting to think about our communication strategy: what to notify members about and how to communicate those notifications. So I'll certainly take your feedback into account. I'm curious though as to why you it's so important for you to hear that a project is ending. Is it to make sure you get to the next badge level, or do you feel like in this case, the project is wrapping up without you understanding why it's finishing, what it's achieved and hopes to achieve? If it's the latter, rest assured this isn't the last you've heard of the HCC team!

(2) Hard to understand project updates
I take your comment about technical project updates seriously. We heard that several times in the volunteer study we recently conducted. The challenge is how to explain a complex and lengthy scientific process in terms that you and I can understand. We are thinking about how we can improve this and we're challenging our researchers to provide laymen summaries along with what you call 'mumbo jumbo' :) I'll be honest though, this is no easy task and may take some time and a lot of trial and error to get it right, so please bear with us!