Now Mark.

Mark asks:

David, could you please just walk me thru what you hope to have happen with me. I'm in Portland, Oregon, now what comes next?

The richer areas are divided up into 20 world zones, each having 120 individual partner areas.

Portland is part of the USA Western world zone (California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington & Nevada). 4 of the 20 world zones have already been divided up into individual partner areas, but USA Western is not one of them. USA Western has still to be divided up.

So:

1. When Portland has been apportioned, some feedback on the way it has been divided up would be appreciated. The aim will be for each partner area in Portland to contain about 400-500,000 people and to make one geographically unified unit.
2. Once our World Connectory Project website is up and running, please advertise it and contribute to the wiki pages set aside there for the use of people in your part of Portland and for the “mutuality” formed between your Portland area and the area allocated to you.
3. To use the time between now and Configuration Day to publicise the project and start enlisting supporters and participants. Ned.Portland would make an excellent recruitment centre!
4. On Configuration Day, the USA Western zone will be allocated 120 poorer areas from around the world. The poorer area allocated to your own part of Portland will be one of those 120 areas, drawn perhaps from 40 or 50 countries from around the world. So Portland partner areas won’t know from what part of the world their allocated area will come, but if they get a partner from a certain country, they will know what part of that country their partner is likely to come from. On the other hand the poorer partner areas will know for sure that their partner area will come from one of the areas in USA Western. It would help to have some contact addresses in the USA Western zone that poorer partner areas could contact in advance of the final allocation process to get more information about the kind of links they might like to develop with areas in USA Western.
5. After Distribution Day, when individual partner areas have been allocated, areas will be free to develop whatever links they wish with their allocated partner areas, but the Worldwide Connectory (Project Manual and Good Practice Guide) will contain guidelines about what the next steps might be. One suggestion will be to try and locate people from within your own partner area who have strong links to your allocated area - especially if they might then be used to educate the Portland public about daily life in the poorer partner area. In which case ned.portland might make a good venue to stage a "getting to know more about our allocated partner area" event

I could go on…

Does this help?