First, I apologize if this is not the most appropriate place for this thread. Please move it if that is the case. In a way, this is a suggestion but it's not about the network or the WCG agents or projects. It's specifically about teams. Also, my understanding is that each team is allowed one thread in this forum for soliciting new members. Perhaps this thread could be considered the thread for WCG members NOT part of a team?

I have been a WCG member for about 14 months now and have never been a member of any team. It doesn't seem to affect how much CPU I contribute or how many WU's I complete. I've scanned thru some of the many team threads in this forum and, frankly, I get the impression that they are more used for communicating among team members than for getting new members - not that that is a bad thing mind you. According to today's statistics, there are 151,612 members. 66,666 of those are members of a team. That means there are 84,946 members who are not part of any team - ie, 1.27 non-team members for every team member. Frankly, I don't see a simple way to easily compare teams to make an informed decision about which team to join. In that case, I may simply not bother and "go away".

So here's what I am thinking. We have one additional thread in the Teams forum - call it a Team Index. it would be a single thread with one post per team allowed. It would have a standard format for content of a team's post. Non-team members could then simply read thru this one thread and be able to compare teams based on the common post format. If a team's post needed to be updated, the existing post would have to be deleted by the poster and a new post created. The standard format could have things like (not necessarily in this order):

Team Name:
Team Captain: (as per the team profile)
Team Leader: (for cases where the captain is not an active member)
Team Website URL: (for teams that have one)
Team Target Audience: (who the team targets for mebers)
Team Forum: (for teams that have one)
Link to Join:
Link to Team Page: (in WCG)
Team description: (what is so special about this team that someone would want to join it)

Right now, at best, some of this information can be found by looking one by one at the first post in each team's current thread. With a Team Index like this, From the Joing a Team link on MY GRID, I can search team names or descriptions for certain words. But I have to know what I WANT to search for. I'm searching in the dark so to speak. Maybe even the Find A Team page could include a link to this Team Index eventually.

To the admins, if this post is not appropriate, please yank it. If you're okay with it, what do you think about this? For someone wanting to join a team who tries to go thru the Teams forum to find one, the intra-team posts end up being a lot of chaff. Team captains/leaders: do you see any worth to this for your team? Do you see other entries in the standard format that should be included?

This may be streaching things here but if the Team Index was a separate forum, I could browse the individual entries and then use the Forum Search to look for entries with items that I decide are of interest to me.

The $64K question of course is would someone deciding to join a team think it would be worth the bother to look at a Team Index?

If this comes to pass and I find an entry that convinces me to join a given team, I've got (in a few days now) 250,000 unallocated points since I've never joined a team before