The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The term was coined by one of our founding board members, Brian Eno. When Brian first moved to New York City he found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now.

Guidelines

for a long-lived, long-valuable institution

• Serve the long view (and the long viewer)
• Foster responsibility
• Reward patience
• Mind mythic depth
• Ally with competition
• Take no sides
• Leverage longevity

Projects

Seminars

The purpose of the series is to build a coherent, compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking, to help nudge civilization toward Long Now's goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.

Clock

The 10,000 Year Clock Project was conceived by Danny Hillis as a monument to long term thinking. The design development on the Clock began in 01997 and has generated an early prototype, an orrery like planetary display, and several machanical and design patents.

Rosetta Project

The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project website is now the largest collection of linguistic data on the Net. You can view, comment or add to the material we have collected in over 2300 languages.

Long Server

The Long Server is the over-arching program for Long Now's digitial continuity software projects. Most recently we released an open source Timeline tool dubbed the Long Viewer, and are now working on a file format conversion project called The Format Exchange funded by the Elektra Foundation and Omidyar.net.

Long Bets

On the Long Bets web site you can make predictions or bets about future events of importance. We now have lower betting minimums, voting, and discussions.

Nevada

The Long Now Foundation has purchased desert mountain land adjoining Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada.

Conferences

The Long Now Foundation has held a series of Conferences since 01998 on digital continuity, long term libraries and our Rosetta Project.