sj's Longest Now [v.1]

Step 1 : Throw a party.

Step 2 : Make it really, really big.  10,000 people?  Almost there.

Step 3 : Don’t hold back.  Invite everyone;  make it a spectacle of an event. 

Step 4 : Only ask for 1/3 of the total cost of the event from the world
at large.  If this doesn’t come to a few million dollars, you’ve
done something wrong.

Step 5 : Put up a nice progress bar on your website to show people how well fundraising is going.

I guess it helps if you’re a major international body working towards the peaceful betterment of mankind. 

WSIS I reflections

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/special/informationsociety/template10.do
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/special/informationsociety

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On Saturday, Boston was
chosen by an 11-person jury to be the host city for next summer’s Wikimedia
conference (aka Wikimania
2006).  The week-long event on global
collaboration and free knowledge is being sponsored primarily by HLS’s
Berkman Center for
Internet & Society.   Over 50
speakers and 600 attendees from around the planet are expected to
attend – an energetic mix of Wikimedia contributors;
wiki maintainers and developers; academic researchers in law,
technology, and sociology; and librarians, educators, and
entrepreneurs. 

You can see part of last year’s program and
schedule on the old Wikimania
website.  This year will be even more amazing; to help out, sign up on our volunteer page.

The decision followed a month-long bid
process that culminated in a deadlocked jury and a week of
overtime
deliberation. 
The two finalist bids, for Boston
and Toronto,
were both so strong that a jury vote earlier this month was
inconclusive.  After asking for more information from both
bids and from
the global Wikimedia community, a second vote this past weekend was
5–4 in favor of Boston,
with 2 abstentions.

The Toronto bid
included a generous offer of from the University of Toronto’s

Knowledge Media Design
Institute, including free use of their new Bahen Centre for Information Technology,
and was supported by an impressive local team.  

 
The Boston bid is
supported by its own local team; by the Berkman
Center (offering space, funding
and enthusiasm); by the MIT Media
Lab‘s electronic
publishing group (offering to host part of the event); and by
many smaller local
groups of the Boston event in various ways.

Care of a German-Korean collaboration. You can add items to a map layer,
have resulting content stored in the db associated with WP articles,
and have tags show up on the map with the article’s name. Then you can
add/remove these items by layer…)

Click on the map to see the layered world-map itself.