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For those of you unfamiliar with Old World Wisconsin, visit their website for a greater amount of detail and accuracy than I can provide here.  When you’re through come back and this will make more sense (don’t worry I’m not going anywhere).

On our first stop I asked a farmer what period we were in and he told me 1890, or about 120 years in the past.  When I considered how different this world was from our own, didn’t seem as radically different as if I was to imagine the world 120 years in the future.  It then occurred to me, if we can create a place where people live as if they were 120 years in the past, what would it be like to do the same thing for a place 120 years in the future?

This is not too far off from Walt Disney’s original vision of Walt Disney World’s EPCOT (not to be confused with what was later realized by his brother); as the man describes himself in this fascinating little film.

In my experience the greatest detriment to progress is no the lack of intelligence, ambition or even resources that hold us back but it i the “legacy”, the perceived need to maintain compatibility with the status quo that is used to justify decisions that prevent us from moving into the future as quickly as possible.  This is easily observed in information systems, transportation, communications, medicine and education.  By making a clean break, and by dissolving the bonds between this new community and the existing world around it this barrier is effectively removed.  By selecting the populace of this century-ahead society we are able to allow creativity and innovation to flow freely and unrestricted by the old ways of thinking and the fear used to hold us back.

This is not to say that we intend to throw away all of the accumulated wisdom of the last century, just that we throw away the prejudices and follow the advice when it provides rational value and not out of dogmatic obedience.

This is the goal, and the endpoint (which is in reality, the beginning) is clear; what is unclear is the road to this destination.  I intend to research and experiment to discover this road and I want all of you who are listening to consider this an open invitation to collaborate on this effort.

So when I refer to #newworldwi this is what I’m talking about, assembling a community that operates a century ahead of the rest of the world.  100 years may seem ambitious, given that even the great Walt Disney couldn’t build something 20 years in the future, but then again he was stopped well before his time and its very interesting to consider how things might have been otherwise.