Welcome to the weblog for the Computing Community Consortium!

In its founding documents, the CCC describes its goals as follows:

The challenge for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives.

All great goals. But how do we set about accomplishing them? While it is still early days for the CCC, a number of very interesting proposals for “visioning” have already been generated by the research community, including proposals in robotics, CS theory, “big data” computing, and a wide variety of other areas. These promise to give us all something to think about, debate, work on, and leverage to enlarge the CS research funding pie. We can all hope that this kind of community involvement not only continues, but accelerates.

Brainstorming, discussing and driving “longer range, audacious research challenges” is the job of the entire community, and the CCC is always looking for ways to encourage and facilitate broad community participation.  The CCC will support and help to organize many venues for this: at workshops and conferences, in publications, and on its own web site at http://www.cra.org/ccc.

The purpose of this blog is to try a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

So, this blog is an experiment — being run initially by the CCC Council, but ultimately we would hope that the research community as a whole might somehow take over the most effective online forums. We want to get started, though, and so here we are. To get us off the ground, we’ve assembled a group of researchers to provide the initial set of articles for this blog. Each member of this group blog is being asked to write their own (possibly opinionated) analyses or commentaries on CS visioning concepts, including those funded by the CCC. In addition, there will be reports of interesting events, discoveries, funding news, and even perhaps various scuttlebutt of relevance to the computing research community.

We hope that you will all subscribe! Expect roughly two to three articles per month.  You may post comments, and in fact doing so is very highly encouraged!  (They may even be anonymous if you prefer.)  This will be at least one online mechanism for community debate and discussion. If this works well, it is conceivable that we could muster up the courage to try something more in the vein of collaboration-encouraging social networking.

Welcome!

— Peter Lee and Andrew McCallum