I’m switching over to Tumblr. You can now check out my posts here.
It’s a long story, but it has to do with me not currently having access to my network administrator. I don’t have the login for the server, so I can’t upgrade WordPress, so I get a torrent of spam here that is too large to manage.
Hopefully I’ll figure it out some day, but for now, give me a find on Tumblr.
My friend Christian from StartingBloc is working to pull together a critical thinking community. Before organizing us into groups, he’s asked us a few questions about the world. Here are some of my answers.
Why is the world of politics so conflict-ridden?
Politics is now a subset of the corporate world. Our planet used to be primarily organized around countries, geographic location. Somewhere in the past century, we’ve made a shift; our primary organizing principle is now based around corporations. Corporations have the power, not countries. So Politics are a derivative of the corporate world.
Our corporate culture values individualism. Politics are supposed to be about communalism – that’s one of the ideas behind representation and democracy. So when you impose individual ideals on a community-oriented system, things get pretty messed up.
Basically, our political system is an artifact of a past time, and trying to hang onto it in it’s current iteration is futile.
Describe your version of the completely fulfilled life.
I am living a fulfilled life. Earlier this year, I realized that my life is perfect. What I mean by that is the way I spend my time is aligned with my values. Certainly, I still have room to improve this skill. But I’ve gotten far enough that I can spend more time being than daydreaming.
Some would call this coming to terms with one’s own mortality. No matter when I die, be it today or in 100 years, my life will have been concise, elegant, and beautiful. As long as I have this intention, I can feel fulfilled.
Certainly, I still have goals. But I’m not going to let things out of my control get me down. Doing my best is all I can do, and it’s worthless to hang onto expectations based on outcomes that I can’t influence.
Also though, I acknowledge that I come from an extremely privileged background. I have no idea how I would judge fulfillment if I were in someone else’s shoes.
Science Fiction is becoming our reality. But will we get the chance to arrive, and does it even matter?
I was recently watching some Ghost in the Shell. Shortly after, I read an article in the Economist about three interesting developments in digital interactions with the human brain. It might not be long before we arrive at a world where consciousness seamlessly links the analog and digital worlds.
In some ways. this could be cool. What would we need to get there?
One of my friends was telling me that there may have been as many as fifty variety of human-like species that have evolved relatively independently on this planet [we're the only one still living]. There’s something about evolution that likes people.
Although we don’t often think of it this way, software is a part of nature, a piece of evolution. There is nothing in this universe outside of nature.
There’s a lot of talk about technology. Technology that directly addresses global problems:
Yet there’s a much larger issue that we overlook in this process – these problems are symtoms. Each of these issues is a subset of our greater social issues that I listed before.
In nature, before we started messing things up, feedback and decision-making was instantaneous, completely integrated. Or in the language I often use, dependences [energy flows] all came with relationships [feedback]. There were no linear systems.
Nowadays, feedback plods along, and doesn’t get back to the decision-makers until ecosystem-biodiversity has gone through dramatic decline. Part of this is because there are so few decision-makers in the first place.
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Spirituality: experiencing an awareness of something bigger. This is my definition, expansive and inclusive.
A bee hive is more of an organism than a bee. Bees work on simple and elegant operations that create intelligent behavior on the scale of the hive. Bees an their own are stupid, and die quickly.
People are social beings. Ideally, we’d be acting as a hive. Right now, we’re acting like a bunch of independents. And we’re killing us everyone else [many of the other species] in the process.
So, in the broad sense, I see spirituality as an answer:
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If we end civilization rather than pioneer our way to the next stage of the evolution of life, it won’t be that big a deal in the frame of this planet. In not too long [geologically speaking], some other organism will most likely take our place, playing a similar role as we did. Statistically speaking, this is by far the most likely future.
But as a human, I’m hopeful. I diligently work towards a world where consciousness pervades culture.
The following was last edited on May 20th, 2010:
Sustainability has become a marketing term, just like organic. It has lost its heart. People seem to have forgotten what it means.
For example, PVTA busses often say on them “Save the world; ride a bus.” But there is actually no world-saving going on when one rides a bus. The person is just killing the world slightly less quickly then if they were to drive a car, and much faster than if they were biking.
Sustainability means something that can be done again and again on a geological time frame. I am fairly sure that such a term excludes small-scale “sustainable” agriculture, and probably even civilization.
Now I’m not saying that we should give up.
Sustainability as an aspiration is still honorable. But it’s only a beginning.
The following was last edited on May 19th, 2010. I’m not about to finish it, so, rather than delete it, I’ll post this draft.
Lately I have been noticing that communication is actually what matters. I care deeply about the environment. I also understand that our planet and our people have a phenomenally short timeline with which to work. Our world is vastly overpopulated, and we use much too much energy and resources. We need to become more efficient, more balanced. Well, only if we plan on being around for much longer.
But our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to work with our problems. We have the technology. We have the know-how. Many solutions rely not on innovation, but on simplification, getting our global system to be composed of numerous locally-sufficient communities. Small scale-sustainable agriculture, green energy – these sort of things are already moving along. Let’s make them mainstream.
But the issue is that very few people care. Very few people are concerned about our world’s current state. But it isn’t their fault; they just haven’t heard the truth in terms that they can relate to. And you can’t tell people to care; they need to come to their own conclusions.
So what we really need to work on now is communication; help people care. This isn’t easy though.
Of course, I was at the premier last night. The ending was a really big let-down. But I knew it was coming. Harry Potter was a written for me before it was produced.
The evil Voldemort gets killed. And Harry and his friends live happily ever after.
This is a fundamentally flawed lesson. Life’s only about the lazy American [*US] kind of happiness if you’re completely atheistic. And when I use that term, I mean it in the most expansive of ways – someone that doesn’t believe in anything bigger than themselves. Can’t we get the slightest bit spiritual here and conclude that the goal of life isn’t worldy bliss? Maybe I need to rephrase that.
This “getting by” mentality fuels a supermajority in our country. And can only ever perpetuate blindness of the bigger picture. Any bigger picture.
One of the issues here is that people aren’t evil. That word’s pretty cheesy anyways, but if we’re going to use it, only ideas or mindsets can ever be evil.
People are pretty nebulous. What is a person anyways? I see a person as more a set of relationships than a list of attributes. One things that I do know about people though is that they can always change.
Ideas, on the other hand, are inherently static at their core, in one way or another. Some ideas, the kind that emphasize process over product, are more likely to result in dynamic behaviors though.
There are almost some redeeming pieces to the film. Neville was onto something when he said that Harry is less representative of person, and more a mindset – the mindset of hope. But then everything was lost with the epilogue.
Indifference [sleep] is worse than hatred.
It got me thinking about how messed up our prison system is. Prisons should be about healing. How do we expect our society to heal [again, healing is a process, not a product] if we segregate and degrade those of us that really need help?
Let me just thank JK here for writing about magic. At least that was a good idea.
Anyways though, maybe we could work to get some media out their that transcends this “happily ever after” junk. It’s unrealistic, and certainly isn’t fun.
I’ve been helping my grandparents with their garden this year, and the other day, the rototiller felt kinda funky. So I told Grampy. Today we were investigating his faulty rototiller. After some investigation, we found that the only brass gear in the drive train [the rest are steel] was wearing down. This made him very frustrated.
A little framing:
Grampy’s an old-time New Englander. He’s been growing most of the food for his family since before my mom was born. In 1960 he bought this rototiller. In the past 50 years, he’s replaced this gear one other time. Yet with new parts needed, on average, every 25 years, Grampy busts out terms like “disposable” and “planned obsolescence!” With most equipment you’d buy today, you’re lucky to go a season without something breaking…
And you know, he’s right. It’s unfortunate nowadays that pretty much everything we use is disposable – from cars, to snow blowers, to computers, to tooth brushes. Engineers are pretty smart; maybe they should do cool stuff [like design things with quality again]. But I shouldn’t be blaming the engineers. Who ever invented “away” wasn’t much of a systems thinker.
The arrangement of components in an organism matter more than the composition of each component. Networks matter, and they’re more about ties than nodes. Energy flow is key. Boundaries, not so much. An edge is just a location of increased diversity and interaction, not a wall. People are more like cells than islands. Only coherent in context. And information isn’t material, it’s dynamic motivation. It can pass through media. Intelligence emerges.
The present is a selector. It’s a tool to manipulate and transform energy.
Time, it’s all out there. Everything that has happened and will happen is like a huge play room, strewn with toys. Which one are you gonna pick up? Because you can’t have them all at once. But who would want that anyways? I know I like to concentrate my energy on just a handful of toys at a time.
Actually, you can’t even see all the toys at one time; it’s a big room with a lot of junk impeding your view. Sometimes you can find a tree though [there are skylights in the room, allowing for strong, natural lighting]. Give it a climb. But remember, when you’re way up there, although you might realize how the pieces fit together, you’ll need to get back on the ground to assemble them.
Time isn’t linear because it isn’t one-dimensional. And be careful where you move the present, because if you aren’t constantly vigilant, that selector might slip. You could trip, and hurt somethin’.
Then again, don’t get too attached. Sometimes a toy will look beautiful. You pick it up, and all the sudden, is it holding you? Be vulnerable, but be dynamic.
So then there are those times, where you need somebody to go grab something for you, a little collaboration. You found a bike frame, and you’d really like to go for a ride, but the wheel’s way over there. This is where innovation can come in. Grab your buddies. Get in a little team work. Then take ‘er for a spin.
Oh yeah, and sequence doesn’t always matter.
[insert fun/deep/integrated ending here]
Okay, when the iPad came out, I thought it was dumb. Now, I think it can save me money. [Web 3.0 would be happy to hear me saying this.]
So my MacBook Pro is coming up in the end of it’s three year warrenty. And I break it a lot [it's been totaled maybe three times since I got it...]. Why does it break? I bring it everywhere [which is a lot of places] and use it every day.
So this is where the iPad comes in. I do video/audio/photo work, and other intensive stuff regularly, but maybe only 20% of the time. The other 80% is web-based:
*Google [Mail, Docs, Cal, Voice, Reader]
*Facebook
*Twitter
So this is where the strategy comes in. I upgrade my old MacBook Pro to 1TB of storage and 8GB of RAM [$200 in total] and turn it into a desktop [essentially no wear; it's already super-glued together] to last me one to three more years. This pushes off the upgrade of my next MBP. And then I get an iPad 2, Smart Cover, Bluetooth keyboard and switch over to that gig for my day-to-day.
Now let’s crunch some numbers. Tech works on an upgrade schedule: I don’t care about the materials that my hardware’s composed of; I care about the data manipulation it can do. Altogether, these upgrades might push this Apple suite* from approximately $2000 to $3000. And delay the upgrade to my next MBP [estimated at $3000, by the time I trick it out to a decent spec] by two years. So that means I’d extend my upgrade cycle by two years and save almost $2000. Now I know, this doesn’t take into account the next cycle [I bet my iPads will have a faster half life than my MBPs], but no matter what I’d save money.
*it should be noted that I’ve left my iPhone out of this budget, as it makes my tech spending look just horrendous [AT&T]. Skype is allowing me to save some serious dollars in this regard though.
The following has been excerpted from my Output Packet Two for Gaia University. Also, it’s taken me forever to post it, so it’s a little out of date.
Pathway Reflection:
Overall, I feel very good about my where I’m at right now in life. My projects have been very engaging, and my learnings have been integrated across these projects. I’m just getting going with my learning pathway this year, as this is my first project-based output. My Learning Matrix is linked below.
Figure 1: Learning Matrix
Project and professional skill-building reflection can be viewed in the body of this output.
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Specification
This is my first project-based output. Collaboration is the topic of this output. The creation of this output took place while being with two other Gaia Associates also creating their first project-based output. Although I talk a bit about our experience working collaboratively, the bulk of this output focuses on collaboration through the lens of project management and tools; it touches base with my primary projects and how collaboration intersects with them.
This output is to be read from start to finish. Numerous links are available for further exploration in my Portfolio of Supporting Evidence at the bottom.
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Prologue
On Tuesday, January 25th, I flew into Denver, Colorado from my home in Massachusetts. Todd, a fellow Gaia Associate, picked me up and brought me to his retreat center, Syzygy Community House, 9,000 feet up in the mountains. Nick, another Gaia Associate from Wisconsin, had already been at Syzygy for most of the month, working on an aquaponics project in Todd’s geodesic greenhouse as part of a Collaborative Project Exchange [worktrade]. With aquaponics as a backdrop, the three of us have set out on a collaborative outputting process. Our intention was to have all of our outputs finished and reviewed by the following Tuesday, one week in.
We prepared for this collaboration in a few ways. As background research, we discovered that Patrick and Ethan, two other Gaia associates, had done a collaborative output before, so we used their work as a jumping-off point. Nick and Todd already had written up an extensive Collaborative Exchange Project agreement. I added to and modified this document. We created a Syzygy Collaborative Exchange Project Agreement template as one of the outputs for the process. After that we created our Motherdoc – a huge document outlining everything about our collaborative outputting process, including an exhaustive schedule, project description, and resources list. We also created an agreement for all of us.
On Wednesday, February 2nd, we had planned a sweatlodge in celebration of Imbolc [the midpoint between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox]. It turned out to be too cold to do one [-30 degrees Fahrenheit], but we were able to do other things instead. Our intention was to have these ceremony coincide with the completion of out outputs.
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Body
Project Management:
Jennifer and I are soon going to have a skillflex [content, as opposed to process] advising session on project management. Jennifer is the director of Gaia Southeast, my regional center.
We reviewed the basics of project management back at my orientation at the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. These include such things as scheduling and keeping on top of communications. We also reviewed various design processes. At the following Permaculture Teacher Training, we got to look at roles, analyzing how teams can divide responsibility to have a more well-rounded effort.
I’m interested in exploring these areas further. I’d like to have a better understanding of how people work in collaboration, and when to use leadership and support roles. Fortunately, I’m involved in a number of projects where I get to experiment with such things first hand.
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A note on leadership versus inspiration: on January 28th in the All-Gaia Call: World Cafe on New Years Resolutions, Associate Ron brought up the idea that it’s important to distinguish between leadership and inspiration, and when to use each. Another word for inspiration could be delegation, but they’re not quite the same.
For example, with the FCSS, I’m currently in a leadership role, but would like to get the group of students that I’m mentoring to organize this event to become autonomous so that I could step back into an advisory role and focus more of my attention on the projects that are more relevant for to me.
This topic ties in to what Gregory, a Gaia Advisor, has said about the role of the Magician Ironist. Traditionally, leadership has been hierarchical, out front, but this doesn’t have to be the case. With the Magician Ironists, leaders work off of teach individuals strengths and the dynamics of a team, creating a unified effort without obvious leadership.
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In order to better understand my experience with collaborative tools, it’s important to understand my digiphon for project management. Google provides me with most of my utilities. I use gMail as my primary communications platform. I carefully organize all of my e-mails. I use my inbox a bit like a to-do list in that when it’s empty I know that I don’t have anyone left to get back to. Google also recently added a feature so that I can create to-dos that are linked to e-mails, so I can have something like “call Mary” in a list, and then remember more about what we were going to talk about by clicking on the corresponding e-mail. After meeting with someone I’ll usually follow up with an e-mail because it seems like other people use their inboxs similarly to me.
I use gCal as my calendar. I only write things on my calendar that have to do with other people. For example, even if I know I’ve set aside a certain amount of time for reading, I usually remember adequately and my calendar during that period will be blank.
I use gVoice to manage phone-calls and text messages.
And then, probably most importantly, I use gDocs. I’ve been a Google fan since I adopted gMail as my first e-mail platform back in 2005, when an invitation was needed. In the beginning of 2008 I began an independent study with a friend in multi-variable calculus. gDocs had just been released, and seemed like the perfect platform with which to share documents. I’ve been using it as my primary office suite since then, and it’s currently storing over 800 documents for me. I like it first for the improved reliability of the Cloud over that of my internal hard drive [which fail once every year or two]. But what I really like about it is the ease of collaboration.
gDocs allows me to do pretty much anything that I need to. I can open e-mail attachment directly into gDocs. I can create a document, and then send out an e-mail to everyone that I’m inviting to the document right inside their platform. I can have documents be completely private, shared with a few individuals, or public with the link so that I can create little architectures of references between documents and external referrals [such as my web site]. I can review the revision history of a document, seeing who made what change when. I can comment on documents and I can chat with collaborators on the side bar. The most important part about gDocs is it’s centralized location: collaboration first, flashiness and ease-of-use second. This is at odds with the competition – Microsoft Office, Apple’s iWork – and what really does it for me.
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And then there’s Facebook [FB], which has recently been cutting into Google’s share of my projects with a vengeance. Unfortunately, FB doesn’t organize my information nearly as well as Google. With Google I have labels, a search that actually works, and a chronology. With FB, the only data I have easy access to is recent data. Much of the time I wish that I could reference not-so-recent items.
There are some huge advantages to FB over Google. The biggest is transparency; FB is usually representative of whole people, not just their business facade. And I know that I work much better with friends than with people whose relationship remains on the surface level with me. I’m more motivated, more driven, more accountable. Namasté Solar, a cooperatively owned company in Boulder, Colorado that we visited, uses the terms “frank, open, honest.” I think this sums up the kind of communications that I prefer to have with people, and FB does this better than any other platform I know.
One example of a recent project where I’ve been using FB as my communications platform is alumni outreach for PVPA. Although I know a lot of PVPA graduates, most of them are clustered around my year. To have strong representation, it’s important to get in touch with people that graduated many years before I did. PVPA doesn’t have a database of this information, but there is a FB group for PVPA alumni that contains almost 400 members. By sending FB messages to the administrators of that group,I was able to get a pretty well-rounded representation. Now with our core group or organizers we’re going to try to figure out our next steps.
Another example of something that would probably only happen on FB is a recent collaboration started with a friend named Max. A mutual permaculture friend introduced us in a FB status update. A little while later, Max messaged me with this project he’s working on to document urban permaculture projects in an attempt to create a handbook of sorts. I posted some statuses, tagging friends that might be able to help out with the project – from the technical to the practical aspects. And the great thing about tagging people in a status is that anyone can see it. If the idea’s popular, it will receive lots of comments, notifying each other contributor or tagged individual, increasing the likelihood that they will get involved. As opposed to private communication pathways, FB can create momentum behind good ideas.
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Social…
What does social mean? In the past few years, the term has really taken off: social networking, social media, social entrepreneurialism. I hear it every day. There are even news groups, such as Mashable, that focus only on “social” stuff. What’s the big deal about social though, and why is everyone talking about it right now? It wasn’t always such such a big thing?
What does the dictionary have to say? Primarily, social is in relation to society. It also has to do with status, companionship, and meeting new people for pleasure. And upon investigating society, I’ve found that it simply means a grouping of people, often defined to do some shared attribute, such as geographic location. So basically, social just means that it’s about people. In some ways I’d hope that things that people do are about people, but apparently, much of what people do is about other things – mostly money or laziness.
There has been some recent developments in web technology that have enabled social-whatever to be progressed to a new level. Web used to be static; now it’s dynamic. This means that it can respond to users, or help users respond to other users.
Social is a very important term when talking about collaboration. For me, as I mentioned earlier, non-social collaborations just aren’t that fun or meaningful.
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Prioritization – Project Shepherd:
Following my Colorado trip I’m going to visit my business partner Tim. I am collaborating on Project Shepherd [my primary venture] with Tim, in Palo Alto, California. One of the primary activities we’ll be doing on the trip is creating a mind map of all our connections, and then sorting them [priorities, collaborations, finances, et cetera]. Tim and I have a phenomenal number of brilliant and diverse connections through our networks. We also are tied at various levels to numerous initiatives. We’d really like to push forward with Project Shepherd – a venture about youth, food, and sustainability – move from the ideas stage into implementation.
Project Shepherd was initially inspired back at Terra Madre ‘08, Slow Food’s biennial meet-up in Italy, where about 7,000 people from over 140 countries come together to talk about food, and mobilize to get things moving upon their return home. There is a youth version of Slow Food, Youth Food Movement, and Tim was involved with them at that Terra Madre. There seemed to be a need for a web-based communications platform so that people would be able to keep in touch and up-to-date. Tim even won a SparkSeed entrepreneurialism competition sponsored by Grassroots.org and Ashoka’s Youth Venture and was provided with seed capital, but Tim and I got so busy with projects while we were at UMass together that Project Shepherd fell by the wayside.
Tim took a job at FB, and I was presented with the opportunity to transfer to Gaia University, allowing me to shift to full-time work on my projects. Project Shepherd was now able to move to the forefront. After researching our field for some time, and along with some recent connections that Tim and I made, producing a film about the global youth food movement seemed like the best first step for Project Shepherd. We’re still interested in the web platform; it is just going to take a lot more work.
A useful web platform seems as though it would look more like a robust project management application than some kind of forum. So I started researching project management and the various platform that are currently available. I discovered some interesting things. Project management was initially developed by engineers to increase product development efficiency – optimizing input allocation and integration to honor constraints of scope, time, and budget. As it was developed by engineers, traditional forms of project management use a lot of equations to determine these things.
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Network Research – PV Grows:
Recently I’ve been doing some research on networks for a group that I’m on the Steering Committee of back home, PV Grows. We’re working to strengthen local food infrastructure through low-interest loans and our diverse network of people involved in the Pioneer Valley food system of Western Massachusetts in a variety of ways. I’m connecting with organizations that have networks, similar and different, to help us make an informed decision about what the PV Grows network should look like [events, communications tools, structure, et cetera] and why.
I’ve been learning a lot about how groups of people come together and progress a common aim. A lot of these learnings have been relevant to not only my work for PV Grows, but also for my work with Project Shepherd.
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Collaboration – Syzygy:
So what did I learned about collaboration from this visit?
As I mentioned, Nick has been here for the past month working on an aquaculture project. As outlined in our agreements, that was going to be the focus of our collaboration. What is aquaponics? An aquaponics system incorporates fish and plants in a closed system for food production.
A review of our schedule puts our process in perspective. This trip has been composed of a few field trips. The first was to Shoshoni ashram, which Todd has a close connection with and is only a few minutes down the road. Shoshoni is in the process of setting up an fairly large aquaponics system in a greenhouse off a side of one of their buildings. We also visited Namaste Ssolar, a cooperatively owned company, managed and founded by Todd’s brother Blake. As I’m interested in management, it was great to hear about what that looks like in a cooperative. And then we also visited Naropa University, a Buddhist university in Boulder. Todd received his Masters from Naropa, and we’re working with a few Naropa students on the aquaponics project. I’m interested in getting to know Naropa University better, as they could be a good ally for my projects with university food systems.
We found that there wasn’t really enough time during my visit to do a lot of project work and complete this output, so we prioritized the output. Without as much hands-on collaborative work, I haven’t been able to reflect very much about the process, so I shifted the content of my output to collaborations in general.
The bulk of my supporting evidence comes in the form of documents that we developed together. Todd’s output is almost exclusively about the creation of these documents, as they have a lot of relevance to livelihood.
Todd and I created our Collaborative Exchange Project Agreement first It was modeled off of the the CEP Agreement that Nick and Todd created for Nick’s visit, tailored to me. I made the modifications and Todd reviewed and approved them.
Once we were all together, we started writing all of the other documents, such as the Motherdocument, the minutes, the collaborative outputting agreements, as they informed our process in working together. The names of these documents summarize their purpose. At the end of our time together we duplicated and modified these specific documents into generalized form to make templates. We didn’t have any serious disagreements along the way and our process was very straightforward and smooth for me.
To write these documents, we would often be in the same room so that we could talk with each other when necessary, but work individually on a mix of outputting and developing these documents. Our time was mostly self directed rather than us all being hands on with one article at a time.
The only document that I might have changed was Todd and my initial agreements. Although we had a series of internal reviews [at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of my stay], the trip didn’t turn out exactly as I anticipated. For example, I was hoping to spend more time with Todd’s family, doing yoga and Chi Gung with Todd, and doing some installation work with the aquaponics project. I still had a great time, but I think we might have had an easier time planning and and reflecting on process if this agreement had been short and direct. Although our agreement contained everything, it might have been too detailed to use for quick productive analyses.
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Conclusion
Collaboration is a key component of my pathway, as all of my projects involve collaboration in one form or another. I have a pretty solid starting point for the tools I use for project management, and I’m getting to experiment to discover what kinds of projects are conducive to what sorts of collaboration. Regardless of what kind of collaboration I’m involved with, clear intentions and communications are vital to a healthy collaboration.
In addition to this output, my collaboration with Todd and Nick yielded templates for other associates to use for collaborative outputs as well as templates for future Collaborative Exchange Programs at Syzygy.
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Portfolio of Supporting Evidence
Resources directly relating to the creation of this output:
Motherdocument
Agreements: Collaborative Outputting
Template: Collaborative Outputting Agreements
Agreements: Will & Todd’s Collaborative Exchange Project
Template: Syzygy Collaborative Exchange Project Agreements
Minutes: Collaborative Outputting
Log: Will & Todd’s CEP
Photo Documentation
PV Grows: Network Research
Project Shepherd: Project Management Research
Itinerary: California Trip with Tim
Video: Will Talks Casually About Project Shepherd
Video: Wheatgrass Juicing I
Video: Wheatgrass Juicing II
Learning Intentions and Pathways Design
Notes: Visit to Namasté Solar and Naropa University
Other resources:
All-Gaia Call: World Cafe on New Years Resolutions
Blog
Flickr
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Process Reflection
This output turned turned out differently than I thought it was going to. At first, I thought this output was going to be on the process of working with others to create an aquaponics system. But due primarily to time restrictions, I shifted my focus to collaboration and how it relates to all of my current projects.
Although we began and ended the process with a lot of working together, most of our work in the middle was done independently but simultaneously, so that we could shout out questions to each other. There is certainly a lot more momentum behind this sort of process when working around others, particularly when they’re fellow associates.
We primarily worked during business hours. Todd spent much of his time with his family over at his house while Nick and I lived at Syzygy. There was some self-care overlay, such as working with sprouts [raw food], and a bit of Chi Gung.
The trip seems to have been a good length. Ideally it might have been a little longer, but I don’t have many chunks of free time longer than two weeks with all of commitments back home.
One interesting thing that we noticed is that we all have slightly different requirements. Todd and I are at Gaia Southeast, when Nick is with Gaia Regenerative Design Institute [RDI]. But then Nick and I are both in the Bachelors program when Todd is working on his post-graduate degree.
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Digiphon
My MacBook Pro [computer] allows me to use applications, such as VUE [mind-mapping software] and Adobe Lightroom II [photo management]. Lightroom allows me to organize the photos I take with my Nikon D50 [camera]. When my MacBook Pro is paired with Wi-fi [internet] I’m able to use collaborative tools such as DropBox [filesharing software], gDocs [wordprocessing], and gMail [e-mail]. My iPhone 4 [still & video camera, computer] works as a more mobile version of my MacBook Pro and D50, and shoots HD video.