Sorry mycroft, ever thought about becoming a politician? viao has asked a pertinate question, which I was going to ask at the end of the month, and deserves a better answer. By the way, why is it there no input from the membership on the "Advisory Board," or don't the views of the "crunchers" count?

Remember, WCG is nothing without us!

Thanks for your concern about the next project. We were sweating bullets earlier this year because none of the research organizations out there were sending in RFPs. In recent months we have received four RFPs for new projects. These are in various stages of the review/approval process at this time. It is our policy to keep quiet about RFPs until they make it through the approval process and the Advisory Board has a chance to ok them. There are a couple of things we can tell you right now.

At this time, we are working on a new project but are not at liberty to divulge what it is yet. There's a formal agreement that has to be signed between the research organization and World Community Grid and until that's signed, it is not a done deal. We have set a tentative launch date for this project on October 31. More information will be forth coming after the Advisory Board “blesses” this project at their next meeting on September 26.

Human Proteome Folding is approximately 85% finished and is scheduled to end during early November of this year. Rich Bonneau, as mentioned in one of his updates, will be generating a few additional work batches that we will run in case we complete all current 104 work units before the new project is launched. These additional work batches will not be "busy" work but will be real crunching. Rich is also busy preparing the public domain database with the results of the project and is writing some papers about the findings from the Human Proteome Folding project.

There's also a good chance that there will be a Phase II of the Human Proteome Folding project. Rich Bonneau has submitted an RFP for that and we are working with the ISB to get an agreement in place. Rich Bonneau will be providing more details about the new phase after the Advisory Board reviews the project on at their next meeting on September 26.

The other two RFPs are in the review process and we have targeted the first quarter of 2006 to board them on to World Community Grid. Can’t divulge anything about them yet but we can tell you that one has to do with cancer research and the other is about geographic pandemic disease research.

There was also a question about providing input from the membership to the Advisory Board at their meeting. The Advisory Board is primarily about research… particularly they ensure that what is running on World Community Grid is relevant, current, is needed by scientists, and will help move us toward alleviating human suffering. The best way we can all help the Advisory Board, in addition to donating our PCs, is to contact non-profit research organizations, make them aware of World Community Grid, and urge them to send in RFPs. With everyone’s help, we may just be able to provide the compute power to eradicate some terrible disease.

Hope this information helps, but now I’ve got to get back to work. In addition to the projects mentioned above, we are also preparing for the Linux client launch which will be announced in the next few weeks, the frame work for allowing the website to accommodate other languages is being built, and we are working on the first non-English version of the website… French. That’s why we can’t spend a lot of time in the forums. Too much work to do.

Thanks for understanding.

Even that limited amount of information, bound by nondisclosure before they start, is very encouraging. I hope y'all can give the folks a choice of crunching projects when they happen.

Excellent news, very encouraging as has been said. Also, thanks very much for posting the info, it's nice to be a part of something like this