Milliongenerations:Competition

Milliongenerations.org plans to organize a competiton for a prize to one or more contributors or alternatively one or more contributions, preferably in regular intervals.

How to compete and how to determine the winnars remains to be clarified.

Ideas on a competition

What happened up until now:?

The competition should be about the MillionGenerations cause. The big question is: how?

Initially Carl Kerchmar came up with the idea abut a competition mechanism. He started to play with the concept of 'million'. He suggested it would be good to get a million people to participate in a competition and to name the first person to get a million votes as the winner: a million for a million.

Later Carl and me, Onno Hansen, discussed the content of the competition. We agreed that the cause of MillionGenerations is not that simple to communicate. So we came up a simplification: what if we would ask people to think about the implications of living themselves for one million year. This would simplify the cause while not losing the essence. The simplification would make the cause very personal. The MillionGenerations competition thus could be about: what is needed in the world around is to facilitate a person who lives for a million years to live happily.

Collaborative Competition?

At first sight, a competition may seem to conflict with the ideal of open collaboration. No need though: for the English word "compete", it's etymology is attributed* to Latin competere, "to strive together" : com-, together + petere, to seek, strive ..., thus we may choose to consider its original meaning is free from any inherent notions of adversity, or ruthlessness toward one's rivals or even wishing one's opponents would perform less than excellently.

* The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition, 1976, ISBN # 0-395-20360-0