Radio silence explained

You may have noticed sparse posting on this blog after announcing our newest Board of Directors additions in March.

Yet we've been keeping busy behind the scenes, as we've sharpened our focus on grant-writing and securing stable financing for our project. Here's a recap of some of our achievements last week:

• We submitted our first grant application to Changemakers.net (an initiative of Ashokha Foundation) and have several more applications in process. In the spirit of full transparency, you can read our grant application in its entirety here.
• We welcomed Umer Raffat, M.P.H., to Clinical Trials Wiki as our new V.P. of Finance/Strategy.
  
• We are beginning an architectural overhaul of the site, expanding our database of publicly accessible clinical trials, and centering our content display and discussion forums around scientific publications from the clinical trial literature.

As you know, we're continuing work on this site alongside our day-to-day lives. Last week I started a rotation at the Brigham's Levine Cardiac Unit, which will keep me busy through the end of April, and am spending my weekends hunting for apartments in Murray Hill. While still mysteriously finding time to write and edit our grants, Brice is traveling France on what promises to be a life-changing trip. And, inspiring the envy of overachieving multi-taskers everywhere, Gaurav is working behind the curtain on technical development after his day job at a venture capital firm.

Please continue to send us your questions or feedback about our ongoing work on the site.

Whew!

I think I speak for the entire team at ClinicalTrialsWiki.org when I say that we're thrilled to have a new, far more functional site go live today. Everyone here has been working feverishly over the last 72 hours to get this work done, though it's just the beginning.

To his credit, Brice has been on call in the ICU and several times decided to get work done with us post-call instead of going to sleep. And this weekend, Gaurav heroically led our webcrawler development effort though his new fiancee flew into town for the weekend! Both of my teammates continue to inspire me with their passion for this project.

Here are a few highlights of our achievements over the last few days:

• We designed and implemented a Wikibot to automate the extraction of data from ClinicalTrials.gov
  
• We laid out a brand new format for our clinical trials 'data' page
• We decided on a new logo, color scheme, and website layout
• We met with friends and colleagues at HMS, the Countway medical library, and HealthMap to get feedback on our ideas and refine our thinking about the site
• We've set up meetings with NEJM and FDA to discuss possible partnership and site integration

Every minute as I write this, our crawler is adding 5-10 new fully populated clinical trials to our site. Look for even more changes to come, particularly as we enhance the usability of the wiki features of the site, so that anyone on the web can edit articles and upload data files.

We're committed to being 100% transparent with you about how we develop and maintain our site. We know you might have ideas about where we should go from here, and we want to hear from you.