On July 9-11, in Denver, Colorado, a high level historic workshop took place to develop a broad outline of how humanity might effectively deal with the first unambiguous knowledge that sentient non-human intelligence was about to make contact with us.

Twenty-four participants from many professions (academe, entertainment, journalism, military, strategists, business, politics, science) contributed to a systematic process of developing a spectrum of possible contact events, extracting the most important implications from each one, and then structuring a comprehensive strategy for effectively anticipating and responding to whatever might arise.

Although this was an initial - and certainly incomplete - attempt at thinking about this extraordinary possibility, it was the first endeavor that the leaders are aware of, of this type of process being undertaken, particularly by a non-government group. This was the second meeting organized by Michael Lindemann, editor and publisher of CNI News, and Kyle Pickford, a mergers and acquisitions consultant, around this theme. The ultimate purpose of this project is to produce an authoritative and credible baseline document that explores all general possible contact situations and posits near and long-term responses to such an event. When it is completed within the next few weeks, this study will be published on this website and will also be available from other sources.

This Contact Planning II workshop was sponsored by the International Space Sciences Organization, a newly formed research institute whose focus centers around exploring the different scientific, social and policy issues that might attend a major human evolutionary transition to a new era of life on the planet. ISSO was founded by Joseph Firmage, a Silicon Valley Internet entrepreneur who has been a significant contributor in this area of thinking in recent months.

Contact Planning II was designed and facilitated by a futurist and scenario planning consultant who took the group step-by-step through an intensive process of identifying a broad spectrum of plausible non-human intelligences and developing a long list of major avenues of possible interaction. These elements, arrayed around the speed of unfoldment of the event, the familiarity or strangeness of the non-human intelligence, and the perceived threat or beneficence of what was transpiring, gave rise to eight scenario groups (fast, familiar, threatening; slow, strange, beneficent; etc.) which spanned all of the possibilities within this definition of critical uncertainties.

In order to assure that all possible types of contact were considered, an exercise was undertaken to identify the comprehensive spectra of non-human form, origin, and communication. These factors then became the 'ingredients' for developing snippets of stories, which in the aggregate provided a very broad, yet somewhat detailed, perspective of the types of events that should be included in the deliberation.

The snippets were clustered in the original scenario groups and time was given to extracting from each general group what the implications for humanity might be in the short term. These implications, in turn, were used as the basis for developing general strategies for anticipation and response to each scenario group.