to the patent. This limit prevents the examiner from being overwhelmed by a flood of prior art. Granularity: Peer-to-Patent breaks down the process of volunteering into single questions and tasks, allowing volunteers to more easily choose which roles to occupy and what to contribute. Participants can opt to post comments, submit prior art, evaluate postings, or be active in group discussion. Community-building: a critical aspect of Peer-to-Patent is creating a sense of community among volunteers, which leads to the likelihood of continued participation and can entice volunteers with side benefits. Volunteers describe their interests and qualifications in their profiles, invite colleagues to join the discussions, respond to each other's comments, and enhance the reputations of productive volunteers by giving "thumbs-ups" to their prior art submissions. Examples of potential side benefits are job signaling (demonstrating skills that can lead to job opportunities for students or consultants) and finding colleagues for research projects. The office action The role of the patent examiner in Peer To Patent remains the same as with traditional applications, except that Peer to Patent applications move to the head of the queue, to reward patent applicants who participate, and the patent examiner is forwarded the ten highest rated submissions of prior art from the Peer To Patent community to aid in their examination. Governance The Peer To Patent project is an independent project set up by New York Law School and operated through the school's Center for Patent Innovations. An agreement between the USPTO and Peer To Patent allows the project to submit prior art to USPTO examiners. The steering committee includes patent attorneys from major patent-holding companies. The computer industry provides most of the steering committee members, since the initial pilot focused on Technology Center 2100. Peer To Patent is funded by project sponsors and by the USPTO. The sponsors include: Article One Partners General Electric Hewlett Packard IBM Microsoft Open Invention Network Red Hat Technology Except where noted, content on the site is available for noncommercial use through a Creative Commons license. A description of the technology used on the site is stated in their first anniversary report, "The Peer To Patent Web site is built using open source technologies. It is an Internet application implemented using Ruby on Rails with a MySQL database on the Linux operating system. The system infrastructure includes hosted Web servers and database servers, as well as load balancers for traffic