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Happy New Year
Tue, 01/08/2008 - 17:59 — wpomerantz
Last week, billions of people around the world turned over the page on a new calendar year. When the evening's festivities were over, we went home and found ourselves ready to take on new challenges. Some people enter the year resolving to improve themselves one way or another--maybe, for example, by posting to their blog more often! Others decide to tackle a new project or learn a new skill. If you are looking for something to challenge yourself and improve the world, maybe you should consider joining a Google Lunar X PRIZE Team! Towards the end of 2007, we launched a new Community Forum on this Google Lunar X PRIZE webpage. It's been very encouraging to see the early adopters of that forum use it to try to find teammates, to share ideas, or to offer their assistance to the groups already pursuing the prize. Every time I see a new message titled "Any teams or prospective members from UAE?" or "Looking for a team to join as member of robotic designer" or something similar, I smile. It's the beauty of this whole internet thing, right? One team that has been remarkably active and very successful in using the Forum to attract new ideas and members is Team Frednet. They seem to chime in anytime anyone offers up some time or an idea, and I think that's paying off. Over the holiday break, they were profiled on national television here in the USA--you can read the piece at that link. I recommend the video even more that the written piece. Kudos to them! The forum community is still relatively small, but I look forward to watching it build over the years. I encourage you to sign up today! One other document that we released towards the end of the year, which some people may have missed, is the first batch of a set of Official Questions and Answers for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. If you've been looking for an answer to a technical question about the rules, I'd highly recommend checking there first. We try to be very precise when answering these kind of questions, as we know that the requirements we impose will make a huge difference for the teams that are actually trying to win the prize. Much as writing the prize rules themselves is a continual balancing act between what is significant and what is actually possible, answering these questions requires balance between wanting to deliver responses as rapidly as possible and needing to answer fairly, thoroughly, and correctly. Past experience has showed that collecting questions and releasing batches of answers about once a month is a good way to achieve that balance--so we'll move forward with that schedule. If you have questions you'd like to see answered in the next batch, you are more than welcome to submit them either in the Forum or by emailing glxp-team -AT- xprize -DOT- org. Some other notes:
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