These Requests for Proposals (RFP) differ from those of previous years. Following the direction of the Governing Board and the advice received during electronic conferences, it has been decided to call for proposals that are focused on data needed by international initiatives such as The International Pollinators Initiative (IPI), The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), The Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 2010 Biodiversity Target or a particular Global Species Groups Conservation Assessment.

The rationale for this decision is that by targeting a specific taxonomic group it should be possible to develop a series of distributed data sets that when combined will contain a richness of information that will permit new in-depth innovative scientific analyses that would not be possible without access to these combined resources. We believe that this approach will demonstrate the value of the global digitisation effort and in the longer term will justify increased funding for digitisation. In addition, by engaging particular user groups for the digitised data in the digitisation process we will demonstrate to a broader community the value of this activity.

The DIGIT RFP (HTML) or (PDF) calls for full proposals due by 15 November 2005, and the ECAT RFP (HTML) or (PDF) calls for preproposals due by 15 September.