The Basic Idea behind InterMix Software
The basic idea is simple: participants write a message and then read and vote on each other's messages. InterMix brings in multiple groups giving each its own "collective voice" while also combining the groups to create a common voice of humanity. 

The UN Day Trial Run
InterMix debuted with the election of a strong heartfelt message for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on UN Day 2011 under the auspices of the United Nations Association of San Francisco. The elected message is in process of being delivered to the Secretary General and we have some hopes of receiving a reply.

The Plan for International Women's Day
The next step will be the election of a message to UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet in time for International Women's Day, which is March 8, 2012. The theme of the 2012 IWD is "Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures". 

For UN Day we had input from the United Nations Association (UNA).  For International Women's Day, the United Religions Initiative (URI) will join the UNA as a second group. To be clear, the IWD message for Michelle Bachelet is not a project of UNA-USA nor of the URI global office. At this point it is the UNA-SF that is sponsoring, though with wider UNA participation, and for URI, we have the OK of the URI Women's Coalition and, importantly, the support of the URI at the UN Cooperation Circle in the persons of Deborah Moldow and Monica Willard, who will help us deliver the elected message to Michelle Bachelet or at least to her office for reply.

How it will Work
Groups and discussions are the basic building blocks of InterMix. Groups may participate in multiple discussions. Discussions may have multiple participating groups. Since we are just starting up, we have only two groups as yet, "Voices of UNA" and "Voices of URI", and just one discussion, "Voices of Humanity - Order out of Chaos". An InterMix discussion may take a "vote" and that is what we are going to do to elect our IWD message beginning January 15, 2012 and concluding March 5th.  Previous start date of Jan 1 has been pushed back to allow more input from UNA-USA and to make sure the programming is complete.  We will still have plenty of time to complete by March 5th.

As in the UN Day 2011 election of a message to Ban Ki-moon, the IWD election of a message to Michelle Bachelet will keep track of the votes by gender and country of origin as well as by group. Two messages will be delivered to Ms. Bachelet for possible response, a women's message written by and voted on by women, and a men's message. Other messages of interest will be available, including: the women's and men's message for UNA and for URI separately, the winning message for each country of origin, and possibly the overall winning message, on the off-chance that it differs from both the women's and the men's winners.

Sign up will be available on this page for both URI and UNA groups towards the end of January. 

About InterMix
InterMix is community software designed to promote a gentle human solidarity. We are now open source at github under the AGPL license.  The intention is to progress to a collective intelligence capability, but we begin with the more doable collective communication function.