Memorandum of Understanding

Millennium Project Nodes are groups of individuals and institutions that connect global and local views. Nodes identify participants, translate questionnaires and reports, and conduct interviews, special research, workshops, symposiums, and advanced training.

Since futures research is actively creating new forms of management and organization, and because new patterns of cyberspace are emerging so rapidly, it is reasonable that The Millennium Project will also evolve organizationally. One strategy to facilitate the Project’s organizational evolution is the establishment of “Nodes.”

As a result of the 1996 Mid-Year meeting of the Planning Committee, it is appropriate to establish more formal relationships with the Nodes, and to establish guidelines for the recognition of future Nodes.

A Millennium Project Node is a self-organizing group of institutions and individuals recognized by the Project that will facilitate the Project’s research or conduct autonomous research in support of the Project. In this capacity, each Node will participate in the identification of incipient world issues and opportunities, study their prospect and their potential resolution, as well as methods for accomplishing such research.

Each Node:

  • assumes lead responsibility for a geographic area or subject
  • has access to the entire Millennium Project (staff, information system, international panels, and the other Nodes) in carrying out its specialized responsibility
  • selects its own Chair who is responsible for the work of the Node and communications with the Project’s coordinating office

Currently, the work of a Node includes:

  1. Select participants for Millennium Project research. These individuals should be selected because of their extensive knowledge and ability to add fresh or new thinking to the study
  2. Translate the short Millennium Project Overview and make sure that translations on the homepage are of good quality
  3. As appropriate and pending budgets, translate questionnaires; distribute the translated and English versions to the regional panel that the Node has selected; collect responses, translate to English, and send to the coordinating office before the specified deadline. Nodes may decide to work in English, but make provisions to assist those who prefer not to work in English
  4. Identify and interview political, business, NGO, UN leaders in their area as necessary
  5. Review and improve the regional considerations section of the 15 Global Challenges for your region

Additionally, Nodes will:

  1. Be offered a variety of ways to financially participate in the sales of the annual State of the Future reports, such as: the opportunity to translate the report, act as agent for the translated version, and/or sell it regionally with royalties shared between the Node and the coordinating office.
  2. As appropriate, add The Millennium Project as a subcontractor to contribute inputs worldwide on-call in your research proposals.  Proposals that draw on The Millennium Project research and or methods should add approximately 10% of such grants and/or contracts for The Millennium Project’s coordinating office.
  3. Initiate its own futures research, methods development, and advanced training with the results shared with the Project as-a-whole as they are produced. For example, a Node might create scenarios that are specific to their geographical region or priority issues. These scenarios could be components of larger scenarios produced by other Nodes or in the Project’s global scenarios. Similarly, if a Node produces a regional State of the Future report it could become a component of another Node’s report or included in the Project’s annual report.
  4. Submit material for the Project’s website and/or create their own homepage that will be linked to the Project’s website.
  5. Recommend futurists, scholars, and other resources as needed to other Nodes.
  6. Organize a planning committee for the Node that will review the Node’s plans and research findings. Ideally, these Members of the Node would be one or two each from government, business, universities, NGOs, International organizations in the country (e.g., UNDP, WHO, etc.), independent consultants, and news media.
  7. Agree that if the work of two Nodes overlap, the coordinating center Node will act as a clearinghouse of studies, informing each Node of the work undertaken by others, identifying needed study areas, and integrating the completed work of the contributors.
  8. Be responsible for the quality of the Node’s work, assuring that its research is apolitical, and publishing the results of its work to promote public awareness and discussion.

Download the MOU

With any comments or questions, please contact Jerry Glenn, Millennium Project Director <jglenn@igc.org>.