First Skype Meeting of the Italian Longevity Alliance: Roadmap for 2013 – A Potential Model for Other Groups

I am pleased to report that the first skype meeting for the Italian Longevity Alliance was a great success. About 15 active members of our group were present during the conference on January 28th, 2013. The main intent of our conference was to create some primary rules for the Italian Longevity Alliance and in this article I discuss some of our new regulations, which hopefully will be inspirational for other Longevity groups: 1) For now we decided not to establish an internal hierarchy and instead emphasize the importance of working together as a team. Our members have a variety of different types of skills (linguistic, informatics, scientific) and therefore everyone will contribute to the group by doing something specific in accordance to the skills that they have. 2) We also decided that we will have a Skype meeting every two months. The meeting will last for approximately two hours and each of us will explain in what ways he or she has contributed to the group during the time between the meetings. This way we can keep up the momentum and make sure everyone is doing something for our group. 3) In addition we agreed that each of us should dedicate at least two hours a week to the Longevity Alliance. That’s about 1% of the time of an entire week. One can dedicate these two hours either to the Italian Longevity Alliance or the International Longevity Alliance – everyone is free to choose, as the main aim is to contribute in some way to our collective project. 4) Because the Italian Longevity Alliance is a volunteer association and because sometimes we all can get busy with other duties in life, we decided that our members can have the option to temporarily suspend their contribution to the movement. This period of inactivity can last weeks, months or even a year but it must be communicated to other members through our Google email group. A member that declares himself/herself temporarily inactive will be granted the status of an “idle” or “standby member”. Members who fail to notify other members about their inactivity period will still be considered operational. 5) Each member who takes part in our Skype conferences will be able to participate in the decisions we make for our movement. Conversely, members who do not attend these conferences will automatically be considered to give assent to the decisions made in the conferences. The decisions we make during our meetings will be published later on our Facebook page ; https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/partito.longevista/ During our conference we also established the Roadmap for 2013 with its primary objectives:

  • We aim to complete the Italian translation of the book “Ending Aging” (by Aubrey De Gray), and other reading materials and videos related to the war on aging.
  • We also aim to create our own web-site relatively soon.
  • We want to create a political program with a “wiki method”.
  • We wish to create a wiki page about longevity.
  • We want to make viral videos on YouTube and/or expand our presence on other online platforms.
  • We wish to arrange a physical meeting between us, and also a first public demonstration, within 2013.
  • And finally we wish to create our own internal constitution to regulate the registration, actions, and participation in our group.

In conclusion, I am proud to say that I am happy to be part of the Italian Longevity Alliance, which has shown great unity and cooperative atmosphere since its very beginning. I am also proud to say that so far we are one of the most active groups of the International Longevity Alliance. If one has a look at our Facebook page he/she will notice that discussions take place almost every day. I hope that our model will be inspirational to other groups and that eventually this article will aid others in determining and creating levels of organization in their own groups. I wish to all of you every success in your work. Massimiliano Maidano # Massimiliano Maidano (known in the group as “Max”) is a Social and Medical Anthropologist and an activist of the Longevity Alliance.