Wrap up and next steps

Nancy J. Kelley

Okay. I don't know about all of you, but I feel like I've been drinking from a water hose. Are there results from the poll questions? It would be almost impossible for me to summarize all the results from this meeting. It's going to require some review of all the materials generated and presented first, generated here at the meeting, and then a synthesis goes on, but we will be sharing those with you. Just some things tha tI heard that struck me over the past few days-- amazing how fast science is moving. It just keeps moving mor equickly every year.

The technology and infrastructure in this field is emerging rapidly as well, I think it provides a real opportunity for this project. The ELISA efforts need to be integrated and embedded; needs to encompass all cultures represented in the project. Charters need to be worked out and established with social and legal norms respected across the international community.

We had good discussions in the working group today. If you have not left your slides from the reports with us, please do that so we can collect tha tinformation. Or if you have prepared remarks that were not in slides, please send that to us as well. The chairs of each group should send summaries around for comment to the people in each group, to have a collective statement about what came out of the working groups this afternoon, and those will be posted on the website.

Some things we have heard about .. with interaction with the press-- continued efforts to make our projects more open and accessible and understandable. Our communications will be sent out through the website and we'll be posting on the website continuously updating that now that the working groups are starting. Please check back frequently. Pilot projects will be posted there. We will be sending out communications through mailchimp, so if you're not receiving messages from the project then please let me know because some of you might be in sinstutitons where mailchimp might be hard to get across the firewall so we might have to figure out some alternatives..

The leadership group has been talking about holding two meetings a year, one in October a more smaller meeting where scientists get together and pilot projects get together or our working groups get together to advance their work, or other things going on in the project as a way of moving the work forward and then a large meeting like this one in May where we can really communicate the output over the last year and highlight the exciting new stuff comig up and deciding what's up.

We will be commencing meetings for wokring groups hopefully conference calls once a month. If anyone wants to participate in more than one working group this afternoon or didn't get a chance, please send in your choice and we can add you to the list of those working groups and make sure you get those notifications.

Finally I think you know a big big next step in temrs of how the project is structured is for the scientific objectives and roadmaps to be defined with more specificity and how is the work going to be distributed across countries, how are pilot projects going to be selected on a more fomral basis, and how can safety and ethical and legal be involved in the groups right from the beginning to ensure they are actively embedded in those projcts.

In addition to the project work, how will the international consortium be structured and the big next step is a big focus on fund raising. So stay tuned and we'll have some updated reports for you hopefully throughout the next year.