Imagining the EGC at work.

Here are our suggestions for the internal process to be followed by the committee. Proposals are to be farmed out to primary and secondary readers for preliminary ranking and funding suggestions. So each member is to rank and make suggestions for funding one fifth of the proposals as primary reader and one fifth as secondary reader. The EGC is to meet once each year at a CMS meeting to adjudicate proposals.

Let us suppose that our initial call for proposals generates 100 proposals. Each member of the Committee would receive 40 proposals to read, 20 as primary reader and 20 as secondary reader. The Chair would be responsible to record which Committee member is primary reader and which Committee member is secondary reader for each proposal on the summary sheet Each member of the Committee then ranks each of the 20 proposals they receive as primary reader and a recommended level of funding for each one. Each member then does the same for the proposals for which they are secondary reader.

At the meeting, the EGC may decide to proceed proposal by proposal, or member by member. In either procedure, the proposals are divided into three piles:

• If both primary and secondary reader agree that a proposal should go unfunded, that proposal is discarded with no further discussion;
• If the primary and secondary reader disagree on funding a proposal (at any level), that proposal is retained with similar proposals for potential further discussion;
• If the primary and secondary reader agree that a proposal should be funded at some level, that proposal is retained with similar proposals for further discussion.