Behind the Scenes with World Community Grid's Active Projects


Interested in learning more about our monthly calls with the researchers for each active World Community Grid project? You can get updates on our website, in our forum, and via email.



World Community Grid volunteers help accelerate scientific research that would otherwise take decades, or might not be possible at all. Like all research, our projects go through highs and lows, encounter unexpected results, add new research team members while bidding goodbye to others, grapple with events in their universities and countries that directly affect scientific work, and do enormous amounts of writing for papers and grants.

Many volunteers have expressed interest in learning more about the day-to-day doings of the research teams, beyond the formal project updates. So for the past year and half, we've been posting a few sentences about the monthly calls we host for the researchers in the forums for each active project. These monthly updates include:

  • Any progress in the research teams' data analysis (on a month-to-month basis, this is very incremental)
  • Upcoming grant applications
  • Progress on paper publications
  • Upcoming conference presentations 
  • New and departing team members
  • Current status of work units (how many processed in the past month, how many processed over the life of the project, estimated backlog, etc.)

Beginning in early August, we'll make this information more widely available in three different ways:

  1. We'll publish a short article on our website for each monthly update on each active project. You'll be able to find these articles tagged as "Research Call Notes."
  2. A link to each of these articles will be automatically be posted into our News forum, along with all other World Community Grid news articles. Volunteers who have questions or comments about a specific update can post in the News forum as well.
  3. You can choose to include these articles as part of a Daily, Weekly, or Monthly digest email by selecting the Research Project News option in your Communications Preferences settings. (You must be logged in to access this feature.)

Thanks to all volunteers who are supporting humanitarian scientific research.