Talk:Online Chemistry Nexus Proposal

Please discuss the proposal here! Martin A. Walker 19:44, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Broad guidelines from the NSF

There are two very basic points which the proposal must cover, according to the NSF, which Ican't find mentioned specifically on these pages. The proposal (and its one page summary) must separately address:

• the intellectual merit of the proposed activity; and
• the broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity.

Physchim62 22:45, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks for getting the ball rolling! The first of these is difficult to define for a project like this. With a proposed total synthesis of X, it's a tangible thing, but for this, the intellectual merit could be regarded as either obvious or elusive, depending on your definition. (That's why I've struggled to respond). As for the broader impacts, I've contacted several people working on the edges of chemistry (see my email on possible advisers); I've got a "yes" from an anthropologist (she uses DNA to track ancestry, etc, and she has a biology BS), and also an enthusiastic "yes" from User:Proteins. I'll be asking these people to write a couple of sentences on how Wikichem could help their fields. Then we can write a broader overview to go with it. Thanks, Martin A. Walker 00:25, 6 August 2009 (UTC)