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Letter to Razorfish

Dear Razorfish,


My name is Nick Moraitis. I am the 17-year-old Co-Coordinator, of the Nation1 Project, an ambitious youth-inspired and run project to link young people using the Internet - across geographic, language, and cultural barriers to make the world a better place. Our project website is at www.nation1.net


We would like to invite Razorfish to become a significant partner in the Nation1 project.


Nation1 is the project of two Junior Summits on children's participation and use of emerging technologies, hosted in 1995 by Sega Corporation in Japan, and in 1998 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's world famous Media Laboratory. I was lucky enough to attend this second event as a delegate, where I met with 100 other youth from 50 countries (and a further 139 countries online) and presented the concept to an audience of government and business leaders - as well as 2000 youth. Also at this event, my fellow project team participant Gerald Tan addressed a declaration about our project to the United Nations General Assembly in New York (suitably via Internet video conference)


Our official description of the site is:
Nation1 Network is to be (primarily) a website located at www.nation1.net. The Network will (1) enhance the capacity of individual youth and youth groups to coordinate input into global (and local) governance; (2) facilitate youth's active knowledge of and participation in global affairs; and (3) augment youth's ability to implement action projects (on important issues like the Environment, Peace and education) on both global and local scales. The site will include (1) "massive conversation" multilingual discussion forums and networking abilities; (2) a news creation and dissemination system; (3) tools to help youth organize and mobilize around issues; and (4) an ecommerce hub for children to develop their own online economy.


During 1999, thanks to initial sponsorship from a private individual, and some companies (Swatch, Apple, etc) our project team participated in a number of youth events and spoke to/consulted with over 5,000 young people at events ranging from the Hague Appeal for Peace (a major end of the century conference attended by Kofi Annan, nobel peace prize winners and royalty as well as 10,000 delegates), to the White House Millennium Celebrations and the State of the World Forum. We partnered with tens of youth organisations to ensure our goals for the site match the real and diverse needs of youth, and that our site will be packed with content from external and as well as internal sources.


In 2000, we have begun establishing a non-profit Foundation (with a Board of Directors including a majority of youth, but also Alan Kay, whose input was seminal to the invention of personal computing amongst other thigns; Carolyn Chin, formerly head of e-commerce for IBM, now at MarketXT Inc; Professor Mitch Resnick of MIT; and Pilar Baptista from Futurekids Mexico, a major educational technology company). MIT have assigned a Research Scientist, Warren Sack (wsack@media.mit.edu) to assist us in developing innovative technologies, and we have purchased some new hardware to begin development of our site by our volunteer programming team. We have also developed a promotional and fundraising strategy. (We are particularly hopeful re: a major charitable foundation funding proposal under serious consideration currently).


Should all go as planned (and we expect it will), we will open a small office to coordinate the project in New York City, with a core stuff of approximately 6 people starting in July. We plan to launch the first version of the network in October, during a major youth gathering capitalising on the Olympic period in Sydney. With our partner organisations (including Oxfam, IEARN.org, the UN through UNICEF and UNESCO, and the Global Youth Action Network) we expect Nation1 will become a dramatic and particularly popular addition to the internet. We envisage Nation1 will attract significant media coverage (our project launch in 1998 alone was reported in feature articles in the New York Times, Wired, Businessweek, on CNN, and media around the world).


This proposal to Razorfish has the potential to be wideranging, and the level of committment to the project could be "as long as a piece of string". It's up to you.


We hope you may consider taking on the primary development role of Nation1.net as a contribution to the project. This would involve Razorfish designing and building an innovative, high impact site that tailors to both high-and low bandwidth users (as we hope a large portion of our users will be in developing countries with limited Internet access) , with a database driven back-end capable of handling maximum levels of user input into the site and significant personalization. With the sponsorship of machine translation technology, the site will also integrate machine translation software as part of a wider multilingual key element.


We will provide significant details on the site concepts and features and work to ensure all resources (servers, bandwidth etc) are available. Over July-September at least, key members of our youth technical project team could participate in the project from your NY office. We would envisgage a number of other organisations will be also willing to assist the development in a secondary/back up role (perhaps with programming, hardware support), such as TCN.com, were Razorfish to take up this lead role. Nation1 has access to all Media Laboratory research and applications and we would also envisgage students/faculty assisting with the development.


Alternatively, Razorfish could


We are asking for a partnership, not a donation. In recognition of your support, we would recognise you under one of our partnership levels (eg. "Activist" for in-kind or financial support worth more than $200,000). We would note your support in a text link on the main page of the Nation1 site, as well as include your logo in longer promotional literature (as well as including a reference in Media releases). We would also provide you with a regular report on the progress of Nation1 into the future, as well as statistics and anecdontes regarding the opinions youth are voicing within the online community. Of course, you would be invited to all promotional events and Nation1 youth participants will be made available to speak at your own events. The partnership could involve any number of further links -- your input on the best ways we could work together would be great.


Below, I'm including a note from our friends at MIT.


~Nick


To whom it may concern:
It is an honor and pleasure to write a letter of support for Nation1. Several of us at the MIT Media Laboratory have worked with Nation1 organizers, since November of 1998, to provide some advice and support for their efforts. As a group of organizers, activists, writers, designers and concerned citizens of the world, Nation1 is truly remarkable. It is the case that their goal as a group is largely motivated by their participation in, what they term, the youth movement. However, from our perspective, the members of Nation1 are simply a very talented and accomplished group of independent collaborators in a larger project that we all hope to accomplish; to give under-represented peoples a stronger voice in the world. Unfortunately, right now, youth and children rarely have a voice in government, the media or business. Nation1's work has the potential to change this state of affairs, and thereby, make the world a better place.


The MIT Media Laboratory has had a long-standing and continuing collaboration with Nation1. Our director, Nicholas Negroponte, was an early proponent of the idea, and some of us helped as the participants at the 1995 and 1998 Junior Summits developed their core issues. At the November 1998 Junior Summit, we played the role of facilitator as the Nation1 founding members met face-to-face to draft the first version of their declaration, which they presented via video-link to the United Nations General Assembly. Since that one-week Summit, we have continued to correspond with Nation1 members, host their website, and provide them with small amounts of administrative and technical support. However, for the past year-and-a-half the Nation1 project has not been our project; it has been the project and responsibility of the young members of Nation1 who are dispersed throughout the world, but in daily communication with one another through the Internet. Today and tomorrow, Nation1's successes are due to the talents and rigorous efforts of the Nation1 membership.


We hope that you, too, are as excited by the possibilities that Nation1 represents and as impressed by the membership of Nation1 as we are. Please join us in supporting this project.


Walter Bender, Senior Ressearch Scientist
Mitch Resnick, Associate Professor
Warren Sack, Research Scientist