I recently came across the1940census.com, which is, in their own words:
… a joint initiative between Archives.com, FamilySearch, findmypast.com, and other leading genealogy organizations, will coordinate efforts to provide quick access to these digital images and immediately start indexing these records to make them searchable online with free and open access.
Infrastructure is already in place to leverage volunteer time indexing images of the census records.
Like many others I’m excited to see this information available online and searchable ( for free! ). I’ve got a few relatives that I’m hoping to find out more about, and they definitely fall into the 1940 timeline.