So I.B.M. is sponsoring gatherings in cities including New York, Seattle and San Francisco, which feature talks by renowned Internet programmers and team coding contests with hand-held computers as prizes.
His nonprofit Stephen Lewis Foundation (stephenlewisfoundation.org) sponsored the gathering here.
"We can either roll over and play dead, or take our flag and walk with it," said Margaret Bianculli, the president of the Sachem Quality of Life Organization, which sponsored the gathering at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4927.
"You have to start because you have people who want you to manage their money or because you have personal wealth, family wealth," said Robin Davis, a managing director of Banc of America Securities, the brokerage firm that sponsored the gathering last Monday.
So far, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration sponsored a gathering of representatives from the 11 tribal colleges and another federal agency has provided funding to the National Academy of Engineering to organize an advisory committee of Native American educators, traditional elders, and engineers, along with mainstream engineering educators.
And today, the Information Work Productivity Council, an industry group, is sponsoring a gathering in New York of business executives, consultants and academics to discuss current research, case studies and future trends.
The group sponsoring the gathering on Friday says it has already helped families uncover the remains of more than 300 victims.
An array of activist groups is organizing a campaign to pressure the companies to refuse to sponsor the gathering, which many of the corporations have done for the Republican and the Democratic Parties for decades.
Moratorium NOW! is sponsoring a gathering for anti-eviction activists in Detroit Saturday.
Markus Nordberg of CERN-Atlas is hosting the Geneva talks and John Templeton Foundation, represented by Mary Anne Meyers, is sponsoring the gathering.
