Heidi & Guy Burgess kindly wrote (on 28/09/2006):

Hi, folks --

We wanted to check in and tell you we are still here and working, albeit slowly, on improving Beyond Intractability. The Hewlett funding for BI has now run out, but we are able to continue maintaining it and even adding to it slowly, nevertheless. We are working intently on fundraising for future efforts, focused especially on spin-off online training programs for particular constituency groups. We are also are asking users to make a small donation to help us maintain the site, and while this hasn't generated huge amounts of money, it has generated a little bit. The following announcement is one that we just sent out to our general mailing list, but we wanted to make sure you got it too. We hope you'll check out the site and recommend it to your colleagues. The more use we get, the more likely it is that we'll be able to get more funding (we hope and think).

I hope all of you are doing well. We miss our annual meetings and hope we'll get to see most of you somewhere sometime soon!

Best,

Heidi and Guy

==============================

We wanted to tell you give you an update on the many free resources
currently available from BeyondIntractability.org -- the website of the
Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project. This system, which focuses
on society's most difficult and dangerous conflicts, includes over 3000
pages of material written with the help of more than 250 experts. If you haven't checked us out recently, please give us a visit -- we are adding new materials all the time.

Currently available resources include:

1. 350+ Essays / Articles - succinct, readable, executive summary-type
articles describing key conflict dynamics and intervention options. Broad
topics covered include, for example: Causes of Conflict, Conflict
Dynamics, Culture, Power, Justice, and Peace Processes (Peacekeeping,
Peace Making, Peacebuilding)

2. 70+ Conflict Expert Interviews - with over 100+ hours of online audio,
plus searchable transcripts.

3. 400+ Book and Article Summaries - providing quick introductions to
key publications.

4. Annotated Conflict Cases - instructive accounts of typical intractable
conflicts, with abundant links to interpretive materials.

5. Four new interactive simulation/role plays, one on racial conflicts in a
high school where users can act as the mediator or one of three
disputing parties, another on complex and deep-rooted ethnic conflict
within a community where players can take on different "third side" roles, a third on environmental framing, and a fourth on environmental dispute resolution more broadly defined.

6. Comprehensive Search System - simple and advanced tools for finding
information.

7. Checklists - suggestions of things for people in different roles to think
about as they struggle to deal with difficult conflict situations.

8. Group Projects - a quick primer for students wishing to limit the
conflicts that often undermine the success of group projects.

9. Guide to Working with Strong Emotions in the Classroom - offers
useful suggestions for discussing the difficult issues that lie at the core
of intractable conflict.

10. Special Editions focused on a variety of topics, including: post-
conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding, civil rights mediation,
conflict/peace journalism, and Bill Ury's "Third Side."

These, and many other, resources are available from the Beyond
Intractability home page. To make things a little easier to find, we've
created a special version of the home page that highlights, by number,
links to the items listed above:
http://www.beyondintractability.org/index-brochure2.jsp

While everything is freely available, we are asking users who can afford it
to make a small donation to defray the cost of system operation. Now
that the Hewlett Foundation (which funded the creation of Beyond
Intractability) has withdrawn from the field, we are depending on these
small contributions to keep the system operating. More information can
be found on our "Guidelines for Using the System" page (marked as 11
on the highlighted home page):
http://www.beyondintractability.org/open-source.jsp

We'd also really appreciate any help you could give us in publicizing the
system's availability (by forwarding this e-mail to potentially interested
colleagues and students, for example) or sending us suggestions of
people and organizations who we should contact.

==============================
Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess
Co-Directors, Conflict Research Consortium
Campus Box 580, University of Colorado
Room A222, ARC Bldg. 3100 Marine Street
Boulder, CO 80309
Phone: (303) 492-1635; Fax: (303) 492-2154
burgess@colorado.edu
http://conflict.colorado.edu
==============================