Tectonic shift think tank/Erik's invite

From: Erik Moeller To: TSTT Participants Subject: Wiki think tank Vancouver - invitation & thoughts Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 02:06:51 +0200 (Wed, 17:06 PDT)

Dear friends,

hopefully, I will see you all in Vancouver next week (or at least hear you, if you are participating remotely). For those of you who have not confirmed your participation yet, please do so by getting in touch with Patricia Schlicht <pschlicht at col dot org> and Wayne Mackintosh <wmackintosh at col dot org>. They can also provide you with further assistance. You will find our current agenda and list of participants (still very much WIP, as is the way of the wiki) on:

http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank

Because I know that people tend to skim long e-mails, I want to ask you first of all to share your thoughts and expectations about this meeting. The easiest way to do so is to edit the wiki. Login to Wikieducator.org, and then visit the following URL:

http://wikieducator.org/index.php?title=Special:Mypage/Vision&action=edit

Tell us about your hopes and dreams, or your harsh realities; share with us your reasons for coming to Vancouver, and what you hope to return with. I would much appreciate it (and yes, I haven't written mine yet ;-).

Wayne and I will facilitate the meeting. I have nothing whatsoever to do with the logistics except for messing them up, so let me focus for a moment on the agenda.

This meeting will, for the first time, bring together leaders in the Open Education space with leaders in collaboration technology. It will be a historic opportunity for us to define what a next generation platform for learning, collaboration, and interaction could look like -- and how we can turn such a platform into a true ecosystem, through open standards and decentralization.

I would like this meeting to be as reality-based as possible. :-) We will spend much of the first day sharing our craziest ideas, but then we should get very practical. We must define high level requirements for such a platform, and should agree on at least a basic set of deliverables, a resourcing strategy, and a timetable.

In the midst of conflict and suffering, humankind is laying the foundation for a planetary civilization. The foundation is made of our stories about the world, the narrative of existence -- and when we feel especially confident about it, we like to call it knowledge. We share a responsibility to ensure that the foundation is stable, that it can be built upon forever, that it is owned by all of us. I am confident that we can achieve this together, and am looking forward to meeting you. -- Peace & Love, Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic