Hi and welcome to the hi:project.

To get off to the best start, I’d like to let others do the talking – three of our champions all of whom learned of the hi:project in recent weeks.

I think Doc Searls is a good place to start. Doc is Alumnus Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, and Fellow, Center for Information Technology and Society, University of California, Santa Barbara, and perhaps most notably the instigator of ProjectVRM.

We’re all human. We’re also all now on one worldwide network, and we need to keep that human too. Nothing is more human than our differences — not only from each other, but from our former selves, even from moment to moment and context to context. Likewise, nothing is more human than our ability to relate to one another in countless ways, all the time, even as we all grow and change. Our new networked world needs to respect that. The hi:project is a great way to help make that so.

Managing Director of the Startup Lab at Singularity University, Pascal Finette, notes:

The approach is not only novel but well thought through and presents an incredible opportunity to get individual privacy on the Internet right.

And winning the award for urgent brevity, entrepreneur, designer and author Dave Gray concludes:

The world needs this.

Of course, there is a world of difference between needing something and making it happen. The value of the synthesis that is the hi:project isn’t worth a forward slash let alone two if it doesn’t catalyze action.

I invite you to take a look around our interim website and if you have any questions, if you have any contributions, do please join in. Please follow @hiproj and point colleagues, friends and family here. We’re particularly keen to build the core tech team as soon as.

I’ll finish here with news of the hi:project’s first meetup, to be hosted most kindly by Lee Bryant and the Postshift team, 6pm, 30th September, at their office in the ‘tech city’ part of London. Hope to see you there.