With some delay, and thanks mostly to the team of Simon (a special thanks to Rafael and Daniele), we can offer now this very Cortona Friends website.
In these Cortona Friends webpages there are general info on our initiative and it is also going to be our on-line journal. Here you can propose and write all your ideas on the theme Cortona-week, suggest new themes, but also, more generally, you can write some short articles, suggest books, conferences. The journal can be a place of discussion and debate all year around. We will also keep our eyes peeled for grants that our students will be able to apply for and give a prompt notice in these journal.
There is a section of the website dedicated to the Cortona-week. This is for the information about the week: the program, the speakers, and the terms and conditions for the students.
This website contains now a system to pay directly by credit card. This system is the internationally well-known Stripe network and is not gratis (2.9 % + €0.30 is the cost for every transaction: for example, if we collect €100.00 from a member, we actually receive 100 – 2.90 – 0.30 = €96.80) but it is considered one the safest kinds of electronic payments. No credit card data is ever stored on our website, it is all handled by Stripe with enterprise levels of security.
With this system, we will be able to collect the yearly association quote for the Cortona Friends APS and we will also use it to collect the registration fee for the Todi-week.
If you want to pay your 2017 membership fee, please follow the instructions on the webpages. If you find any problem with the process, you can write to Simon (simon_at_cortonafriends.org)
At this point, all preliminaries will be done, we reached an agreement with the Lumsa university, so that the students who register for the Cortona-week may have international credits. The university has to do work for that (giving certificates at the end, etc.), and according to tradition in this kind of business, the university usually gets some percentage of the registrations. The question for us here, still open, is how much we have to pay for that. Since we are in the self-financing mood, this percentage may be critical and in this case, we may also consider doing the week without credits.
With end of summer greetings from Luigi and Simon