Not long now until the next mad dash across Europe in a banger. At the end of May, I will be doing another charity car run (along with the others members of the team). It has suddenly got very close.

We were very aware on the last run that people donated money in the hope that we would breakdown. Realising that asking our friends and family to donate again so soon after the last run was asking a lot, we thought we would provide additional incentive by going for a weirdly over-engineered and flaky French car (as opposed to the impenetrable reliability of previous Swedish incumbent, may he Rest in Portugal, all details of which are still on the team blog).

Again, we will be raising money for Gemin-i.org. Gemin-i.org is “a UK-based education charity which uses innovative technology to link schools in over 100 countries, helping young people to learn about global issues and to take action for a better world.

The choice of car is not the only difference, we have a new team member, and we will be upping the technology this year a bit too. Last year we blogged live during the run. We’ll be doing this again but we will also all be tweeting the whole trip. We hope that we can encourage many to follow us as part of our fundraising efforts ( http://twitter.com/teamgi ). In addition, all our tweets will be integrated with in the team blog ( http://www.generalignorance.org ) and, if I can get it all working, will have Google Maps showing our position via a BrightKite mashup (or FireEagle if BrightKite don’t open their API’s in time).

The route this year is particularly fine and takes us from the chocolate heaven of Bruges to the mine fields of Croatia.


We have a few other surprise deviations planned (of which more later).

So, keep an eye out on the team blog for more news of the car, its forthcoming stunning new livery (the eagled-eyed may be just be able to spot the work in progress herein) and further fundraising news. Look forward to your support. You can donate now via the JustGiving link on the team blog.

If you are a social media type and want to help us promote our efforts and our pan-European Twitter madness then we would be delighted to hear from you. And if we don’t, we’ll be coming to noise you up anyway…