A quick break from the usual sorts of posts in this space:

The Computing Community Consortium launched this blog three years ago as a way to promote discussion — about research directions, funding programs, etc. — throughout the computing research community. Today — 234 posts later — the blog has been seen at least 100,000 times. Thanks to everyone who’s visited this website over the past several years!

In the very first post on this blog, Peter Lee and Andrew McCallum described the objective — derived from the goals of the CCC:

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…

 

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.

As our regular readers know, we’ve come a long way from the “two to three articles a month” Peter and Andrew envisioned, but there’s still lots more we can do together. For example, in recent months, this blog has focused more on “reports of interesting events, discoveries, [and] funding news … of relevance to the computing research community,” as Peter and Andrew described it. But we still welcome those occasional — and even opinionated — analyses or commentaries about computer science visioning topics.

And we particularly welcome your involvement. We’re always looking for ways to improve the CCC Blog — which is intended to be for and about the computing research community. If you have ideas, please let us know by commenting in the space below or sending me e-mail. And please continue to spread the word to your colleagues.

Thanks again to everyone!

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)