Agenda 21 NOW! 2015:

Looking back from the year 2050 …

In early 2015 “Agenda 21 NOW!”, the global telecommunication project for students on sustainability, is holding its sixteenth campaign. But before describing what we are heading for this year, I’d like to remind everyone where it all comes from.

When the Internet spread in the late nineties, some of us who are still responsible for this project today had the opportunity to take part in a couple of wonderful international Baltic Sea Project (BSP) conferences. We enjoyed it. We learnt a tremendous lot there. These conferences turned out to be the key experience of our school lives, for both students and teachers.

However, worldwide reality is a bit different. Most students from most of the 193 countries in the world can never take part in such a conference.

With our wow experiences in mind, we had the idea of making international conferencing possible on the net, to engage those who cannot travel but would like to get in touch. We intended to create a kind of online substitute, a worldwide conference on the Internet, with possibilities for good talks and serious discussions in front of a computer rather than in an auditorium. Of course an online conference would not really be the same as a conventional conference, but we hoped it could be a promising new way of international cooperation, with new chances, with intercultural exchange and a lot of really good discussions on the net.

It was clear for us from the very beginning that our project should be about sustainability, that it should be a contribution to education for sustainable development: “Agenda 21 NOW!” (Let’s make the Agenda 21 our agenda NOW, not tomorrow!).

The concept of Agenda 21 NOW! was first presented in a far-off place, beyond the Arctic Circle, when the little town of Sodankylä in northern Finland was the venue for a BSP coordinators meeting, seeing nine national coordinators from the nine BSP countries, Birthe Zimmermann from Denmark as the general coordinator and a lot of BSP teachers gathering for the ten year-anniversary of the BSP on a couple of cold winter days in March 1999.

After that, it took one more year of preparation, and since 5 June 2000, the day of our first global Internet conference, the growing Agenda 21 NOW! team of students and teachers has held fifteen annual conferences, the sixteenth is scheduled on 19 March this year.

As last year I would like to focus a little on two persons who have been working in the team since its very beginning.

First of all there is Thomas Detsch, 34, an IT engineer, who currently works as such for a large US IT-company in Stuttgart. Thomas graduated on the very day of our first conference, 5 June 2000, when, at the age of 19, he had to pass his final oral examination at Anna-Schmidt-School, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. By then, being an IT genius as a school student already, Thomas had created – programmed – Agenda 21 NOW!’s Internet communication platform that once a year brings hundreds or thousands of participants from five continents in touch.

Thomas passed his examination, and the first conference went very well even though a heavy thunderstorm, nicely illuminating the skyline of Frankfurt’s skyscrapers, affected our web server for a certain time in the early morning on that day.

Since that time Thomas has been responsible and further developed what is the technical heart of our conference. If you take part on 19 March this year, if you can read what other participants have written, if you add your own contributions at our upcoming fifteenth conference, if you enjoy a (hopefully!) great conference it is Thomas’ technical work, it is Thomas’ software that enables our worldwide communication.

The second person to be mentioned here is Johannes Steinmann, 29, a doctorate student of engineering and former student of Comprehensive School Kandel, Germany where I once taught. Johannes operates and takes care of the Internet server Thomas’ software is running on. Besides Thomas’ software, it is a quick and well-looked-after Internet server that makes our project possible. Recently, Johannes moved our conference to a state-of-the-art server, for maximum performance and safety.

Johannes joined the project in the year 2001 when he was a school student, and he has been part of the Agenda 21 NOW! team since.

In February 2013, two years ago, I changed my place of work from the city of Trier in Germany’s southwest to a school in Flensburg, on the northernmost tip of Germany. Since then, Agenda 21 NOW! has successfully developed a joint activity, with students from secondary and upper secondary levels from both my former and my current school preparing and running the annual conference as well as the website. It is really nice seeing students from Humboldt-Gymnasium Trier and Kurt-Tucholsky-School Flensburg working together for the third time now on many different levels.

Here are a few words about the topic of the upcoming conference 2015: As you all know sustainability is about what happens in the future, it is about future generations and their living conditions. This time we'd like to talk about the year 2050 and the many processes that place until that time. 2050 is when today's fifteen-year-olds have turned into fifty-year-olds, when today's young generation is responsible for what is going on in the world's headquarters and homes, schools and factories, in New York and Nairobi as well as in the most rural places in Australia's outback and northeastern Siberia.

What should the world be like in 2050? How do we wish things to be like within thirty-five years from now? And how can we get there, how can we achieve the world being a better, a more sustainable world than it is today? What are our tasks, what processes do we need in these thirty-five years? This will be one topic to discuss during this year's conference.

Another option is that we discuss negative scenarios for the year 2050. The world might be worse within 35 years from now, and we will find out what risks there are for us and how we can deal with them.

As always the conference will be a written conference. This means the registered participants will write messages and replies to messages within conference rooms and workshops. All messages will be available throughout the conference, and any message may be replied to at any time. Therefore, if you don’t have time to stay online for the whole 24 hours, it makes sense to come back to the conference at times to see new replies and new messages, and to write more replies and messages …

As said before, the next conference is on 19 March, 2015, the duration is 24 hours, from 00:00 to 24:00 h UTC.

The exact topic is: Road to 2050 - What the world should be like, what the world could be like ...

See you on the net then?

Martin Jarrath

Flensburg, 18 January 2015

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