CZ:Unused1

I am going to make an announcement directed at potential partners. It will be "20 [whatever] ideas about how organizations globally can come together to make a Citizendium revolution; or, how to partner with the most exciting new knowledge project online."

Here are some of the ideas I will get out there, and encourage you to get out there. More ideas (propose them on the forum) welcome.

• University deans/administration: please sign this declaration (to be written and supplied) in which you officially encourage (or even require) your departmental tenure and advancement committees to give credit for significant amounts of CZ editor work (such as number of articles approved, or number of hours worked on articles within a person's specialization).

• University leadership at all levels: officially encourage work on CZ by posting announcements to faculty and students (especially grad students).

• University instructors: join Eduzendium. (Elaborated elsewhere of course.)

• Professional organizations: encourage your members to work on CZ. Pass a resolution of support. Send us a letter of support.

• Philanthropists/foundations: give generously to CZ. (We'll list specific things that we need, and how much they cost.) This is a *tremendous* bang for the buck. After all, CZ, one of the highest-profile new non-profit information projects online, has gotten to where it is on hardly any money at all. Imagine what we could do with just $250,000 per year--and for serious philanthropists looking at a serious project like CZ, that's chicken feed.

• Grantwriters/fundraisers: let us give you some basic material about us. You use and develop that, perhaps with other volunteer grantwriters/fundraisers, in soliciting the funds that must be available to us (but which I haven't had time to chase down myself).

• Software companies with interest in wikis: offer to take the lead in developing a new version of MediaWiki that is suited to CZ and the many new projects that would get started using our model, if it were available in an out-of-the-box fashion. You get the cachet of being our technology provider and also (perhaps) the consultant of choice in setting up new CZ-type wikis.

• Technical companies: have your sysadmin staff learn how a serious, growing wiki like CZ is run, by assigning someone to manage the technical end of the wiki, and to develop our system resources.

• Hosting companies: host CZ for free. We'll credit you on every page, of course. We have five servers now but pay for three.

• Reference publishers: interested in new business models and online collaboration? Consider allowing CZ to be the official venue through which you develop your content publicly, and release it to the world. (I'd elaborate. The ideas here are exciting and we have had significant interest from one of the top academic reference publishers in the world.)

• Owners of out-of-print resources: why let your knowledge resource go to waste if you're not making any money from it? Donate it to CZ.

• Owners of "dead" knowledge wikis: why don't you consider folding in your content to CZ?

• Thought leaders: offer to join our Honorary Board.

• PR firms: we could use pro bono PR representation, which we had at one time (43PR) and which we now miss.  :-)

• Law firms/legal institutes: as we develop, we need pro bono legal advice on a host of issues.

• Prominent institutions (universities, professional organizations, government agencies, thinktanks, etc.) of all sorts: give us your *public* endorsement. Send us a PDF letter that we can upload. (Provide a place where it will be placed.)

• Prominent professors and professionals of all sorts: give us your endorsement as well. (Provide a place where it can be uploaded/address where it can be sent, and upload to the wiki the many that we have already received.)

• Experts of all sorts: sign a petition that recommends that people in your field contribute to CZ.

What do all these ideas have in common? They are things that other organizations and people can do out, of their own initiative, that we directly benefit from, and which basically do not cost us *very* significant effort to organize. Or, if these things do require effort on our part, it's a no brainer that it's worth it and we can expect that people will be excited about expending the effort. In short, this is how to operationalize the oft-heard refrain that we should have more "partners." Sure we should, but I want to have partners that actually do specific things. I am not interested in hearing from people (as I often do) who are basically intrigued that we share common goals, but at bottom have no interest in or ideas about working together in a real, significant way.

The idea is that we circulate this document around to major universities, publishers, thought leaders, etc., and see what comes of it.

|width=10% align=center style="background:#F5F5F5"|  |}