Background, Edge Foundation: "the mandate of Edge Foundation is to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society."

This organization felt that in the early 20th century, literary intellectuals effectively started calling themselves the intellectuals, thereby booting others out of the club, including the likes of John von Neumann, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heinsenberg. Edge wishes to reverse that trend and is taken quite seriously by luminaries. Among other activities, Edge proposes the "question of the year" and invites intellectuals to respond.

The Edge annual question for 2010 is: how is the Internet changing the way you think? Already they have 167 responses (scroll down) from notables, including palenotologists, physicists, evolutionary biologists (yeah, Dawkins), Facebook "platform managers", the president of the Royal Society, various artists, the co-founder of wikipedia...and Alan Alda.