Hello everyone.

The statement at the WCG homepage, "We're helping find ways to improve water-quality" adds to the confusion between cleaning water as an end in itself on one hand, and on the other hand having a clean-water as one result of-, and therefore a means to an end of having clean-water from-, an estuary that is sought to be sustainable from a clean-water point-of-view.

A sustainable estuary means not only clean water, but a host of other environmental benefits as well. This, in my view, is the crux of the confusion.

The first dimension: clean-water first
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If WCG wants to emphasize the clean-water angle of a sustainable estuary, the catch-line should reflect that. My suggestion: "We're helping to find ways to improve water quality thru sustainable estuaries".

The second dimension: environment first
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Now, if WCG wants to emphasize the hosts of benefits from a model of a sustainable estuary with particular focus on clean-water as the one result thereof, I suggest the following catch-line: "We're helping to find ways to improve sustainability of estuaries to give us clean-water".

Because tackling something as big as what an "environment" connotes and implies -- suggests harder work because of the broadness of the environmental front*, and because a clean-water is the most, shall we say, 'meaningful', of what people want to get, I suggest using the first dimension above.

Notes:
*Like what happened with the "Clean Energy" project -- too broad a name and too broad a scope for a project. Also talks about "clean-energy" in all its broadest terms and ends up tying the fate of the broad clean-energy industry to a specific solar-energy industry project.
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This post isn't too long -- it is a very well articulated description of the CFSW project.

Many thanks for th thoughtfull post.

Totally agreed with that. In the past, I've run projects I wasn't even particularly interested in, in the hopes that researchers would see the amounts of horsepower available (and hopefully, results achieved), and start projects that do interest me more.

I remember crunching SETI right back in the early days, and thinking "this is great, but I wish they could turn some of this computer power to curing cancer or something..."

A title of projects are catch words designed... MSM fit to attract many to at least look in. If one resorts to titles seen over peer reviewed papers in Science and Nature journals, you'd not get a fraction to come crunch.

So, no clearly superior alternative from my side.

HCC btw has been a long running named endeavor where the project came from. Not necessarily cancer focused only, but with many of the medical researches, they often have cross application.... we're building base knowledge to further expand on. Hepatitis C eventually leads to cancer... decades later after catching it [and hundreds of thousands don't even know they've been infected], so that part of DDDT2 is double important to many, but no one knows this is a target by looking at the Discover Dengue Drugs - Together title. I've no better title for this science project either :D

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The name is fine, in my opinion. "Computing for Cleaner Coastal Waters" doesn't really cover it, since the way to get cleaner coastal waters is to get cleaner rivers, and the things learned in this project will hopefully be applicable to inland rivers and water bodies as well.

What this thread really tells me, as a volunteer who has spent years monitoring water quality in rivers and streams of my home state, is not that the name is a failure so much as how little people understand watersheds and the hydrological cycle. To an unfortunately large portion of the population today, rivers are something they drive across for about five seconds on their way to work or the mall. There's a big disconnect there.