Milliongenerations:Operational strategy

The foundation (stichting) milliongenerations follows an operational strategy and asks the volunteers to improve it and to act to implement the strategy.

The strategy includes the following steps, initially performed in a bootstrap manner:

• Obtain the status of a charity / Algemeen nut beoogende instelling from the Dutch tax authorities according to the applicable rules

• Obtain sufficient funds for these actions from
  • Private donations
  • Applications for support from e.g., from other agencies.

• Involve volunteers in sufficient numbers and with the skills required to execute these actions
  • by individual contacts to interested / interesting persons

• Refine the concepts for the environment

• Define the prize competition ("million clicks for a million generations"?)
• Plan the implementation of the prize competition

• Implement the environment/platform for the site that
  • in collaboration with and by supporting (an) open source initiative(s) (which likely means hiring one or several programmers to collaborate with the open source initiative(s)
  • Building and testing the desired environment by adapting and building upon existing open source software
  • Testing the system
  • Implementing the environment on milliongenerations.org (the new system should have a way to keep the existing information accessible)
  • The results of the programming remain open source (we hope the format might be useful to unrelated questions as well). If possible, we should make it easily available, similar to Wikipedia's MediaWiki, so others can build upon it.

• Prepare a publication strategy
• Start to widely publish the concept and the prize only when the environment is ready

• Prepare a post-award strategy. This will likely include another round of the prize.

• Award the prizes
• Publish the awards
• Implement the post award strategy
  • Part of the prize probably will be to give the foundation to the winnars for a next. They will be bound to the purpose of milliongenerations.org and to dissolving the milliongenerations.org project after a total of 25 years (see below) but otherwise are free to improve the strategy.

• The foundation was set up on 11 June 2009 for 25 years and thus must be dissolved no later than Sunday, 11 June 2034 (See the rationale of the time limit). Before the dissolution the board of the foundation will have to use all remaining funds in accordance with the charter which may include
  • Awarding final prizes
  • Publishing the results of the milliongenerations.org effort for posterity in whatever way seems adequate
  • Critically reviewing the milliongenerations.org experience and publishing that
  • Conducting all reasonably required formalities to dissolve the foundation (formalities may extend a little after the date as long as they are initiated before)
  • Donating remaining funds to other charitable organizations, primarily those working to increase the odds of existence of as many self-aware future individuals as possible
  • Organize an event such as a conference to mark its dissolution