As promised, here are some of the things which inspired us when we came up with the theme for this year's Imagine Cup.

Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) is an organization that delivers emergency aid to victims of armed conflict, epidemics, and natural and man-made disasters, and to others who lack health care due to social or geographical isolation.  It's an organization based on volunteerism; in helping to relieve the suffering of others, the volunteer not only gives freely of his or her humanity, but creates a link of solidarity from his or her own community to a population in need.  This is an organization that is already dissolving boundaries -- boundaries which prevent people in need from receiving care.  What can we do, as technologists, to help them better help people in need?  I definitely see applicability in Software Design, Web Development, and Short Film Invitationals.

UNESCO's Equality in Education initiative is about dissolving boundaries between children and primary/secondary education.  Even though many countries have pledged to do this by 2005, several countries are at risk of making their goal.  How can technology help?  I think there are a lot of ways, from curriculum content to remote e-learning to localization/translation.

UNICEF is another organization that has a number of programs that helps to advance the quality of life of mankind by dissolving boundaries, ranging from things like monitoring the sanitation level of water to nutrition education to HIV prevention and care.  Again, I think there are a lot of ways that technology can accelerate the progress in many of their programs.

Social networking sites like Friendster is an example of dissolving boundaries that is fun.  Through Friendster you can meet friends of friends of friends (and so on...) in a short period of time.  This dissolves boundaries by cutting through time and space constraints and leveraging the power of the network.

IMDB is another example that dissolves boundaries by making it easy for anyone to get information about movies.  I remember when IMDB first started there were definitely movies that I looked for which didn't exist, and some of the information on movies were incorrect.  But through the collective power of the community, over time, IMDB became more accurate and comprehensive.  Today, it's a thriving business, and a glimpse into the power of the community.  (There are other examples like IMDB: eBay, CDDB, Amazon, etc.)

Not to promote our own software, but Messenger is another technology that has dissolved boundaries by enabling people to communicate cheaply and synchronously.  Given that we have an entire generation of students who have grown up with IM as part of their culture, how can that familiarity become a foundation for an even newer and more innovative way to communicate in the future?

I'm sure there are many more ideas out there that are more exciting than the ones I've mentioned.  And that's good.  When we thought about the theme for this year, we wanted it to be big -- really big, and to be impactful to society at large.  We toyed with choosing "break through" instead of "dissolve," and in the end chose "Imagine a world where technology dissolves the boundaries between us" because we recognized that some boundaries can't be broken -- it takes time, possibly years of persistent work and community participation before the slightest impact can be seen or felt.  As such, it's even more important to get started now.  It's our hope that people who compete in the Imagine Cup this year will appreciate the same challenge regarding time that we saw, and to create innovative solutions to both account for and to accomodate the time element.