I am the President of LiftPort Group. We are the company that is working very hard to commercialize the Space Elevator (as of today, there are 1,560,000 google references to our project).

Recenly, we have had some pretty rough times. That is to be expected in a long-term, high-risk project like ours. So, we turned to the blogging community for help - and got it! We have published our problems, and the community responded with results!

We are upping the ante a little, by installing real-time updates with twitter.com and blogging 2-4 times a day. We are the wikinomics experiment in action. It was very clear that what we were doing was not working, so we are trying this as a course correction. Cross your fingers, it appears to be working already, but we only have enough capital to hold this together until Sept.. so it will be a race to see if we can tranform ourselves and our active supporters/cheerleaders into a revenue producing, open-source, global research project. Wish us luck.

You can contact me at laine@liftport.com or call me at 360 440 2788. I would be interested in talking with you folks, and getting some feedback on how we are approaching the problem. And yuo can follow our progress (or failure...) at http://www.liftport.com/external/blog.html

I'm participating as an Editor, Writer, and Researcher from Seattle, Washington, USA, Earth, Sol Sytem. I am not a very talented writer, so whatever i contribute will have to be edited and corrected. sorry, but its true. I can edit well, and shine things up a little, and organize well, but content creation is not my strong point. That said, i think my best contribution will come from the fact that i am putting many of the concepts into active practice. I would like to volunteer to be the concept guinea pig, the lab rat, the test subject. The assets that i bring to the table in this respect are: global recognition of our project, 60+ universities doing a variety of hardcore reseach, 20+ distributed volunteer employees, and open source ethic, and open source software background, 15 'ambassadors' that spread the word regarding the project. so i guess my best use will be as an in-the-trenches researcher. i hope this is a valuabe set of resources that can help build this next 'chapter 11' into a real asset.

Take care. mjl

also posting here and here and here

Will attempt to develop a case study around my attempts to use a wikified approach to build an Elevator to Space. wish me luck!