Welcome to the pre-launch site of the IPY International Program Office (IPO). This is the place to come to for news, events and links related to the International Polar Year in anticipation of the fully-fledged IPY portal, expected to go live in October.

What www.ipy.org/start allows us to do is to start experimenting with our voices and styles, and see what kind of georeferencing for content works best. And by the time the official IPY portal goes live, we'll have lots of content to populate it with. We expect the URLs here to be permanent, however, so link away.

This site is also a work in progress. Over the next week or two, expect to see better visualization tools for calendars, and also an iCal feed for events.

There will also be some experimenting with KML, for viewing content in a geobrowser like Google Earth or NASA World Wind. And the image on top will also change regularly. After all, there are no penguins in the Arctic, and this website covers both poles

Finally, notice that both the News and Calendar RSS feeds are geospatially enabled — that is, they use GeoRSS, which gives newsreaders all the clues they need to know where a post is written or where an event takes place.