There's another opportunity that provides visibility to our efforts, requires little effort or cost to participate in, and produces real results.
The World Community Grid (
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org) is a multinational grid computing project sponsored by IBM. The WCG hosts research projects for clean water initiatives, clean energy development, children's cancer, diseases and more. Here's how it works:
- To start, you register, then download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer.
- When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research.
The WCG launched in 2004 (
The same year as City of Heroes... Coincidence?) . According to Wikipedia, as of this month it has over 600,000 registered users.
Here's how it works for us:
Visibility: Participants can form teams to compete in events, trying to rack up research points within a time limit. We could create our own "Paragon City Heroes" team. This could make a great story on for CNN's iStories, or as an online press release.
Little Effort & Low-Low-LOW Cost: You can set up an account and install the client in 10 minutes. Cost wise, your only expense is the electricity your computer is using.
Results: Charities are great, but the problem with them is they cost money to run. Unfortunately, a portion (and sometimes it's a large portion) of the money they collect goes to simply keeping the lights on, paying for administrative and marketing costs.
But with WCG, 100% of what you're contributing in power and processor time is being used as intended - it's all going to crunch numbers and develop meaningful, actionable research.
One final thought-We all should be aware that our efforts to save CoH may be for naught. We may not succeed. But the spirit of the game, and its community, could continue on the World Community Grid, in the form of a giant team of real-life heroes, on a long-term Task Force to fight real problems and truly make the world a better place.
What better tribute could there be to the game, its developers and its community?