Mimusops laurifolia: World University & School in the Middle East?, WUaS' endowment-based Wikipedia-MIT OCW model, Althea

Dear R,

It would be great to visit again. Your work seems varied and interesting. I live in the SF Bay Area and I'm developing World University & School - like Wikipedia with MIT Open Course Ware - and writing an ethnography about Harbin Hot Springs - harbin.org - with a virtual world aspect. WuaS is potentially in all languages, nation states, subjects and levels, including in Jordan and Arabic, but that will happen, I hope, at some point in the future. Here's a budding tourism subject - worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Tourism_Studies. People can teach to their web cameras, and WUaS as wiki makes it possible to aggregate all the open, free content on the web. :) Here's the main address: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University Let's talk further about this. Thanks for publishing my chapter, too.

Sincerely,
Scott



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Dear L,

Great. After talking for nearly 2 hours with a friend, and looking somewhat closely at an updated budget, a friend suggested that an advertising (educational) model - more like Google's than Wikipedia's endowment model - might be a helpful way of re-conceiving the open, endowment-based Wikipedia-MIT OCW model I've had in mind so far.

I've had outreach/marketing/branding on the wiki for a fairly long time here: worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Master_Plan, but haven't thought specifically in terms of an advertising focus.

This would certainly give a reason for organizations to give to us, and a way for a head fundraiser to offer something in return. For example, I've seen Harvard's Berkman Center sometimes putting little boxes of sponsors on some of their pages. Here's one for MacArthur/Ford Foundation -cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/broadband_review, but I can't find the bank sponsorship advertisement attached to a lecture which I saw a few weeks ago, and am not finding many advertisements now as I look.

I think nonprofit status in the long run is more important than advertising, although raising money is very important, - and for accreditation in particular. (University of the People is talking at the Berkman Center on April 13, 2010 - a form of advertising, I suppose, for UotP). More consideration of this is needed, but if it would help focus my friend to go out and let folks know about us as a nonprofit, that would be great. I'll ask my friend to find out whether WUaS-solicited advertising would jeopardize nonprofit status.

I'm not optimistic that resources will be forthcoming from C via my friend, so I hope you and I can think of other avenues for resource generation.

Looking forward to getting the Articles of Incorporation from you.

Sincerely,
Scott

http://scottmacleod.com
worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University


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Grateful Dead - Althea 03-28-81















(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/03/mimusops-laurifolia-world-university.html - March 16, 2010)