VPHA & New Year 2016

At the turn of the new year, it is always good to look back on the past year. Significant progress in VPHA occurred in VPHA in 2015 regarding many aspects:

• Better organization to allow the VPHA to proceed "by itself". VPHA-reading-overview-file, VPHA-reading-workflow and info@ vph-ald.com address enable the VPHA participants to find reading that is useful for the progress of the whole VPHA.
• VPHA organizational presentations were delivered at ALD Russia and Baltic ALD. The goal was to invite more people to get interested in VPHA and join it, which succeeded. Still more people are welcome to join, as we are far away from the "target" of 100 active volunteers: at the moment there are 40. 
• Creation of the ALD History Blog, for more visibility and better spreading of information. 
• Last but not least: publication of the ML essay by Malygin, Drozd, Malkov and Smirnov in December 2015 (Item #8 in the VPHA Publication Plan).  In my view, this might very well be the single most important outcome of the whole VPHA. I am very grateful for the authors that they took the time to write the essay; only these authors could write such a detailed account of how ALD evolved under the name Molecular Layering in Soviet Union and Russia since the 1960s. Also I am grateful for VPHA colleagues who helped in January 2015 to define questions that we would like the ML essay to answer.    

In 2016, the plan is to finish the VPHA's on-going tasks: complete the reading, write a scientific review on the history of ALD, and make the necessary updates to Wikipedia (these are numbers #9, #10 and #11 in the VPHA Publication Plan). More participants are welcome to participate in all these activities. The more we are, the less work there is per person, and the better the overall result will be. The most urgent activity to participate now in is to help define the questions, which we would like the scientific ALD History Review to answer. The questions are collected in this file (anyone can leave comments to it). Several good proposals are already included.

Thankful for the achievements so far, and confident that together with all VPHA volunteers we can bring VPHA to a good end in 2016, I want to wish everyone Happy and Successful 2016!

2016, the year to finalise VPHA. Light painting photo by Riikka Puurunen.

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Virtual Project on the History of ALD (VPHA) - in atmosphere of Openness, Respect, and Trust