Milliongenerations talk:Letters

The Letters are a good project with pure intentions. But it is not workable this way! Needs improvements:

• Ask really well known poets, like Ramsey Nasr (Dichter des Vaderlands) or Remco Campert to start the effort and publicize it big time in mainstream media
• Publish a booklet every year with the poem to date that people will want to keep and give to each other
• Think big, don't be limited by money, which can be found for good ideas
• Keep the poem alive: let the sponsors decide the pace of its growth. Let go of the 'one letter per week' and rather publish as many as people want to pay for at a fixed price. This avoids the auction and makes things quicker and you don't know where a given year ends
• Implement something that makes theft of the stones difficult
• Don't put names in the side of stones. Nobody sees that and it is technically difficult
• Don't put a number on the stones beneath the letter either, this is ugly, difficult and makes the letter itself smaller and much less legible
• Present the project with a solid, accountant-drafted budget to sponsors
• Have the project run by a legal entity, foundation better than association, and make sure it is run by professionals, not by volunteers who can not be held to account

--Peter 22:33, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Mmm. Letting go of the one stone per week would indeed simplify many things. And one could still keep count of the weeks by putting a counter in the stones next to the line of letters (though at higher cost of making the stones). The sponsor money=effort then determines the speed and not the time, and effort is what drives civilization more than time. The amount raised for charity (and also available for poets, masons, stone layers and overhead) would probably be quite a bit larger per year. From a poetry perspective that would seem nicer, too, we'd probably get to read much more. The poem could still be endless, so we wouldn't see it all, however fast it is published. Yet: wouldn't this seem to put the focus on the present rather than the future? My gut feeling: yes. Would it be as likely that one finds it worth continuing in fifty years? My gut feeling: less so. The concern for those who can be in the future should be the core value to be expressed by the clearest means possible. This needs to be thought through well (maybe try both concepts and see which lasts longer?) --Michael 23:00, 28 November 2011 (UTC)