Dealing with death, heritage and legacy in the digital age is a complex challenge that is increasingly being addressed. While it is common sense, that some thing like a new kind of digital afterlife will emerge in the second decade of the third millennium, more precise ideas of how these digital legacies could be arranged and handled are largely non-existing.

Finding and providing solutions for several of those challenges is an integral part of the Pyramid project:

Complex arrangements
Pre-planning for your own death or organizing the passage of a loved one is becoming increasingly complex. While one or two decades ago, leaving a last will would mostly have sufficed, we now have to deal with more complex things like living wills, most various financial and insurance matters, dozens of online accounts and often a social network spread across the whole planet.

Three lines on a stone and a shoe box of photos?
An average tombstone today contains no more than 100 kB of information. In an age where most of us own at least half a GB of personal data, we would in part consider making or keeping (semi-)public after our demise, this custom appears clearly outdated. Now, that the days when families collected their photos in a shoe box have already been gone, we still have no clear-cut solution how we could sustainably make our digital heritage accessible.

Who will you be when you are not anymore?
How will people learn about your demise? What opportunities will they have to recollect and share their memories? What would YOU decide should be the crucial information you are leaving behind? Just in case: Where would your Facebook go, your blog, your YouTube vlogs, anything?

We will increasingly address all these questions and make first solutions available next year.

Image: A screenshot from NameChk.com, where you can check user name availability from currently (Nov 2009) 132 social media sites.