"Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment."

(via Mining The Thought Stream)

“Sentiment”. Yes, that’s a very important point. Because “tweets” are very short, immediate messages, they are very different in nature from blogs, discussion forums, or any other longer means of communication, which take longer to write and so are generally more thought out, less spontaneous. More mental, less from the gut.

Also from the article (emphasis added):

What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about.

Traditional search engines typically focus on more static content — the blogs, discussion forums, and so on — and so do a good job of serving up “ideas”, abstractions, but they don’t do so well in putting us in touch with the actual people behind those ideas. In other words, neither search engines nor the content they index do much for building a sense of community and for social interaction.

Sure, discussion forums and blogs (with their related comments) provide an opportunity for people to discuss specific topics together, but everyone involved usually has some sort of “agenda”, even if it’s simply to get their specific message heard by the others. I mean, you spend all that time writing up a message, so you want people to read and understand it, right? And many times, you may even be trying to persuade someone to actually do something or to agree with you on some point. So there tends to be a great deal of emphasis on our own views and on self-promotion, which isn’t particularly (directly) conducive to uniting a community.

Twitter, on the other hand and perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, isn’t really all that much about self-promotion at all, but is much more about just making contact and connections with other people. There simply isn’t enough space in 140 characters to do any sort of persuading. And the fast, immediate nature of the medium makes the message all about what we happen to be doing or thinking in that moment. Kinda like bumping into a friend in the supermarket.

But then, how many of us actually bump into friends at the market anymore? In a way, Twitter is bringing that element of “social serendipity” back into today’s increasingly global community, both online and off. So while we may not physically bump into people in the market so much any more, we can certainly virtually “bump into” someone on Twitter doing something similar to us and strike up a brief conversation, and that could then lead to something more in-depth somewhere else, either online on some blog or wherever or face to face in the “real” world.

So yeah, tweets can be pretty inane, but then you wouldn’t exactly discuss the meaning of life in a supermarket aisle, would you? But that doesn’t make that chance encounter any less important to your relationship with that person.

People complain about Twitter’s lack of features, but in a way, that’s what makes Twitter so ingenious. By making it a bare-bones, lowest-common-denominator service, virtually anyone can perform its most essential function: answering the question “What are you doing?”

Anything beyond that is left entirely to individual preference and to serendipity.

~G

P.S. Follow me on Twitter!

Sandra has just posted a blog entry about this project which gives a bit more background about the project, but I thought I'd post this video here and link to her blog to try and stir up a little buzz about it.

Go check out Sandra's blog, and let's all see if we can do something concrete about changing the world! :)

~G

Hi everyone,

A few of us Gaians have created a pod for Gaia pod moderators and other "Gaia group advocates", the Gaia Groups Community (see pod description below), and it'd be great if you came and checked it out if it sounds like something you might be interested in.

The group is semi-public (invite-only but readable by all), so if you want to join, let me (or one of the other pod mods over there) know, and I'll send you an invite.

Cheers,
Grey

=====

The Gaia Groups Community - "The Mod Pod"

This group is for cultivators and moderators of groups (a.k.a. “pods”) here at Gaia, as well as for anyone else who has aspirations of becoming a cultivator or moderator or otherwise promoting the vibrancy of the pod community.

In this group, we discuss various strategies, issues and ideas related to group administration, as well as help less experienced moderators to develop their groups into thriving spaces that bring about a sense of community both within the group and throughout Gaia. That also includes discussing strategies for and providing support in mediating conflict with and between members of the groups we moderate.

This group also provides opportunities for working together with moderators of similar or complementary groups, as well as for merging groups in order to more effectively unite people with similar interests, not to mention generally building a sense of community among group moderators.

Finally, this group is a place in which we can discuss various important ideas that may have emerged separately in multiple groups, thereby providing us with a better sense of what the free will of the broader Gaia community is, which will, in turn, help us to be better moderators.

Joining the Group

All group cultivators, moderators and other enthusiastic community advocates are encouraged to join the group. To do so, simply contact one of this group's moderators, who are: Grey, Sandra, Meenakshi, Bruce, and Dave.

Enjoy!

I've been doing some more thinking about, well, all sorts of Gaia-related stuff, and I've come up with an idea that could be a sort of precursor to gClouds and a Gaia wiki system, "gReports". Essentially, it's a way of macgyvering a wiki "knowledge base" system inside a pod.

Here is a description of the group-based Knowledge Base and how it might work:

Overview

It has been noted by some that Gaia lacks a “wiki-esque” system for the collaborative creation of “knowledge articles” (see my gClouds blog post and related thread in the Think Tank), which could be very useful in bringing together the knowledge of the community – currently fragmented and dispersed more or less randomly throughout the community – into a single, easily accessible place. Until Gaia has such a system in place, one way of partially filling this gap is for groups to set up dedicated boards to act as a repository for a given community’s knowledge.

To keep the knowledge articles contained in this “knowledge base” easy to reference and maintain, discussion related to the articles should be kept in another board, ideally one specifically created for such discussions. Although it's also possible to link to articles anywhere in the group or, indeed, anywhere around Gaia or beyond.

Because only group moderators can edit posts (and therefore also these articles) beyond the 15 minute window available after submitting a post, special procedures for updating knowledge articles need to be followed. These procedures are described below (see “Editing an Existing Article”).


Creating a Knowledge Article

Before posting a knowledge article, your group will need to have a “Knowledge Base” board and preferably also a dedicated article discussion board.

When you are ready to post a new article, you will need to start the article “thread” in the knowledge base board with a brief post that contains a synopsis or the intention of the article to be written. In part, this is necessary from a technical standpoint for the ongoing article editing process because we don’t want the actual article to be the first post in the thread for reasons we will see in a moment.

This initial post should also contain a section for links to the related article discussion threads (and be sure to start such a thread before creating the article if one doesn’t exist already), and may also include a section for links to other discussion threads (even in other groups), blogs or other content related to the article. These additional links can even be to content from outside the Gaia community.

Once this initial post has been created, the actual article should be posted as a reply to the thread.


Editing an Existing Article

When it comes time to make changes to an existing article for whatever reason, you will need to copy the entire article in its current form and paste it into a new post, which you will need to create using the “reply to thread” function (and NOT the “reply to post” function). Then you can make changes to the text and submit the revised version to the thread.  At this point, you will have both the old and the new versions of the article in the thread as follows:

Synopsis and links
==Old article
==New article

In order to have the old version of the article removed, click “reply to post” for the OLD article and write a message that says something like “OLD VERSION TO BE DELETED”. You may also add references such as “as per discussion”, including a link to the discussion related to the changes that have been made.  Adding an indication such as “minor edit” can also be helpful in determining how much care needs to be taken before deleting the old version, while still keeping the delete request brief.

(Note: If only one or two changes have been made, these changes can be indicated in the delete request.  For multiple changes to an article, you may want to consider enclosing the changes in "***", or something similar, so that it's easier to see what changes have been made. Then when the old article is deleted, the moderator can also remove the markup.)

Now you should have a thread structure like this:

Synopsis and links
==Old article
====Delete request
==New article

At this point, the exact procedures can vary from group to group, but it’s recommended that you agree to a certain time period, say a number of days, that needs to elapse before an article like this can be deleted by a group member with admin privileges. This time period (which may vary depending on whether the edit is substantive or minor) would give other article editors an opportunity to approve or reject the changes before the previous version is lost forever. Once the time period has elapsed with no reasoned objections to the changes being proposed, the old article and any related reply posts may be deleted.

Brief approvals or objections may also be posted either as replies to the delete request or as replies to the new version of the article, but any detailed comments should be kept in the discussion board (and linked to) so as not to overly clutter the actual article thread. Once agreement has been reached as to which version should remain, all of these approval or objection posts in the article thread should be deleted (which is why detailed comments should be posted in the discussion board).

Note: The reason we don’t want the actual article to start an article thread is that, by doing so, when the original article is deleted, the entire thread would be deleted.


Adding Related Links

Here, too, procedures may vary from group to group, but one recommendation for adding related links to an article is to create a new post using the “reply to thread” function. You would end up with a thread like this:

Synopsis and links
==Article
==Additional links

Then this links post can be updated as necessary following the same procedures as for editing the article.

Another option would be to start a new thread with the new introductory message and added links. You would then copy the article over into this new thread and request that the entire old thread be deleted, again leaving a period of time for such deletion to be opposed. However, because creating new threads like this could make management of the knowledge base more complicated and difficult to control, it might be best to discourage creating new threads for the same article as much as possible. Otherwise, there’s a very real risk of ending up with multiple versions of essentially the same article without being able to decide which is the “right” one.


Knowledge Base Index

It’s also a good idea to create an “article” (following the procedures described above) that will serve as an index and/or table of contents for your knowledge base (or two separate articles: a table of contents and an index). This could be structured and sorted in a variety of ways, but try to keep it as simple yet useful as possible.  And don’t forget to link to the articles directly in the index.

With a good, up-to-date index in place, article writers can check here first to make sure a similar article to the one they had in mind hasn’t already been written. The index should also be made “sticky” (by a group moderator) so that it’s easy to access.

Note: Another reason not to start new threads for the same article is to avoid having to update the index when the article is updated.  For this same reason, in fact, you should ensure that the index links to the thread (or the first post in the thread) and NOT to the article post. Otherwise, when you delete an old article, the link from the index will be broken.


The Future of Gaia

One benefit of creating Knowledge Bases like this is that, if Gaia ever does have its own, more sophisticated wiki system, there will already be a store of articles out there just waiting to be added to it.  And if this idea really catches on, it may help Gaia to see the need for such a system in the first place.

So let’s spread the word and spread the wisdom!


P.S. And feel free to copy these instructions for your own knowledge base and adapt them to the needs and preferences of your group!

Not long ago, Chris posted a call for discussion ideas in which he said [emphasis mine]:

Chris: I'm personally hoping for an improvement on the idea of discussions overall, something more innovative and organic. I believe if we're to succeed in our mission of collecting our wisdom and expertise and love and hope for the purpose of achieving higher causes, we certainly need a better tool than a discussion board.

That part, “collecting our wisdom and expertise”, made me think about sites like Wikipedia and Google’s “Knols” project and about how cool it would be for Gaia to have some sort of collaborative (and also not) system for creating “knowledge articles” à la Wikipedia or Knols. But this isn’t my innovative idea.

Let’s just pretend for a minute that Gaia already has a “knowledge article” system in place (and in a sense there is, since you can label a blog post to be an article, but this is too limited of an approach to article creation). What we have, then, are three different modes of “community communication” (i.e. one-to-many or many-to-many, so not counting one-to-one communication like PMs and IMs) and sources of knowledge within Gaia: pods, blogs, and articles.

Each of these systems has its own particular strengths, but there are a few general problems or deficiencies, as well. One of the problems in that discussion on any given topic in all of these modes tends to be very linear, stretching down a web page as far as the participants can bear and then eventually sort of just petering out without really accomplishing anything, other than building a sense of community. Not that building a sense of community isn’t wonderful, but it’s only half of what Gaia is supposed to be about, that is “being the change”. We’ve got tons of being, but not a whole lot of change. Communion, but not much agency.

The other problem is that these three modes are very much separate, and even the various conversations within each mode are separate and fragmented. So you often end up with several discussions on the same topic taking place all around Gaia, but with no easy way to bring all the various views and ideas together into “new knowledge”. The various bits are all “out there”, but nothing much is being done with them.

Now, to a certain extent, simply adding a “Gaia wiki” would already be an improvement, because there would be a way for people to work together on filing away our collective knowledge in a manner that’s more accessible to everyone. But a weakness in the standard wiki model is that one person, on their own, needs to write a decent first draft on a given topic, and then there has to be enough interest and attention paid to the article to get it fleshed out and properly edited and updated.

So what we need is something that will: (1) bridge the gap between all of the fragmented discussion on a particular topic; (2) not be limited by a linear mode of conversation; and (3) bring in more change to the “being the change” equation.

Enter “discussion clouds”, or “Grey Clouds” as I like to call them! You can shorten that to “gClouds” and pretend that it stands for “Gaia Clouds” if you want, but they’ll always be “Grey Clouds” to me. ;-)

What is a “cloud”? Imagine that you’ve been reading a couple of blogs (and related comments) and participating in a pod thread or two on a certain topic, and you get an idea for a “knowledge article” or any other sort of project based on these discussions (could even be simply to resolve a conflict or achieve greater clarity or consensus on the topic). Just create a cloud.

I envision that somewhere on any blog or pod page there would be a “Create a cloud” button. When you click on this button, you would go to a page where you can better define your cloud. This would mean linking any other pod threads, blog posts or articles that you know of that are directly relevant to the cloud and, and this is important, setting a “purpose” for the cloud in a few words (so that it could be displayed across the top of every cloud-view page). That’s the change part, and it also helps distinguish clouds from pods in that a cloud would disperse (i.e. be locked to further discussion) once its purpose had been fulfilled. Discussion could continue in the various pods or blogs that were linked to the cloud, of course, but discussion within that cloud would end when the goal is reached.  As part of the setup process, you would also kick off discussion within the cloud.

An important part of this would be some sort of “cloud map”, like a mind map, that would show all the interconnections between the various branches of the cloud discussion (and the linked discussions). This would help a cloud participant to navigate within the cloud and to have a global view of what’s going on in there. The branching and interconnections could actually get quite complex, again like a mind map, and the cloud map would help you to visualize these interrelationships and see how consensus could be achieved by integrating all of the various reasoned viewpoints. I would even envision that you could draw in your own connecting lines, annotations, color coding, and that sort of thing to the cloud map to help you keep track of everything. Some of these markups could be global for the whole cloud to see, and others could be personal for an individual cloud participant.

Whenever you’re “in” a cloud, you would also see, down one side of the page maybe, lists of the linked or related pod threads, blog posts or articles and could link related stuff (even external web items) as the cloud discussion progressed. Tagging would be an important part of finding related knowledge to link to the cloud, but I’d also like to see topic categories à la BigThink.com to help zero in on related discussions.

And yes, why not also link other clouds to your cloud and create a “perfect storm” of change?

There’s another aspect of Gaia that I haven’t mentioned and which is more about agency and change, and that’s gPro. So you could also link in gPro products and services that could help out in achieving the cloud’s purpose.

I would imagine that pretty much any cloud could end with the writing of some sort of article or report in order to capture the new knowledge that came out of the cloud (even if just to summarize what happened in the cloud for others to learn from), so this is why some system of collecting, creating and indexing Gaia knowledge articles is essential for clouds to work effectively.

Also, I don’t think that clouds should replace pods, because the two modes have very different functions. Clouds are very much more about agency and change, while pods are almost solely about communion and being. But there may very well be ideas here that could be applied to pods to change the way they work. Like “thread maps” to allow more complex discussions to take place without getting bogged down in an unmanageably long, linear thread. In fact, the whole “thread” metaphor might be replaced. Think of pod “clouds” as those pretty white fluffy or wispy clouds that look beautiful but don’t really “do” anything (and wouldn’t have to ever “disperse”), and the clouds I’ve described above would be the rain clouds (which are, of course, “grey”) that redistribute water for plants and animals to benefit from.

So that’s my “killer app” that I think would truly raise the bar on the Gaia community’s ability to “be the change”. Whaddaya think?

With love,
Grey

One of the perennial debates among translators is whether or not to cut out the middleman, i.e. the translation service provider, and work directly for the end customer. Of course, as with most debates, the answer isn’t just a simple “yes” or “no”, but rather “it depends”. So on what exactly does it depend? Today I’d like to take an “integral” approach to answering that question.

Naturally enough, this debate usually arises in the context of complaining about the low rates paid by many translation service providers, with the solution most often proposed being that we should work “direct”. And not that wanting higher rates isn’t a perfectly valid reason to consider working direct, but I don’t think that should be your only motivation for ditching the translation agencies. Indeed, you may find, after a bit of reflection, that you’d be better off staying with agencies and just doing what you can to find the ones that treat you the best.

So first of all, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that agencies do play an important role in the translation market and that there’s at least a certain segment of the market that is best served by these translation service providers. I know some of you may say that most agencies just pass texts back and forth between the customer and the translator and make translations unnecessarily expensive, but that issue goes beyond the scope of this article.

So the first question to ask yourself, then, before you go off looking for direct customers is, Are my skills and specializations suited to serving the segment of the market that is best served by a translator directly? We might call this, in AQAL terms, an upper-right quadrant (UR, or individual/exterior) question because it concerns the “external” expression of your individual abilities.

Now, I would argue that most of the situations in which working direct is most appropriate are situations in which the translator essentially acts as a consultant to the customer, and so provides a range of advisory services in addition to just translating the texts they’re given. So if you have a good deal of expertise in a particular field that you can use to advise customers on how best to create their texts in your target language and that sets you apart from the competition, then you may indeed be a candidate for working direct.

However, the next question you should ask yourself is, Do I have the drive and passion for this field of expertise in order to go out and find the customers and deal with all of their requests, questions, and (hopefully very few) complaints? This we could call an upper-left quadrant (UL, or individual/interior) question. After all, this extra work is what justifies your higher rate, but if you don’t really love what you do, then you’re probably going to have a hard time attracting enough customers, and the direct customers that you do get will probably annoy the hell out of you with all their questions and demands. (Of course, if you don’t really love what you do, then maybe you should be doing something else, but that, too, goes beyond the scope of this article.)

So if you have to answer “no” to either of these two questions, it’s likely that you would be better off working with translation agencies. In the case of the first question, you may not have particularly unique expertise in your field of specialization, but fortunately agencies are not usually looking for that, since their customers, in turn, aren’t usually looking for a great deal of expertise. And as for the second question, if you don’t really, really love what you do, agencies are great because they just give you the texts to translate, and you’re free to focus on getting that specific job done without having to worry about all the other hassles that come with dealing with the customer directly.

Of course, hopefully you do have “enough” expertise and passion for your job to be able to attract the high-quality agencies that are able to pay you a better rate and that know how to treat translators right because, to be perfectly blunt, if you don’t specialize in a particular field or don’t particularly enjoy what you do, then you may already be earning the rates you deserve (and again, perhaps you should consider a career change).

So what about the other two quadrants, the lower left (LL, collective/interior) and lower right (LR, collective/exterior)? Well, questions in these quadrants tend to deal with the issue of which customers are better served by agencies and which by translators directly, what kind of skills a translator needs to work direct, what sorts of relationships tend to be formed with the customer, how much competition there is in your specific field, and that sort of thing, so I’ll deal with these two quadrants in another article.

In the meantime, if you’re not totally satisfied with your career as a translator, take some time to think about the issues in these first two quadrants, and see if you’re taking advantage of your skills in the most appropriate manner and if your current customers (whether they’re agencies or direct) are giving you enough satisfaction and enabling you to express your passion for your job to the fullest extent possible.

All the best,
Grey

Note: This article is also being posted as a newsletter as part of the Integral Translating "campaign".

This is a question that comes up a lot in all sorts of ways, but personally I think it's essentially a "non-issue" from an "integral" point of view. It's also a question that really has nothing to do with our true Self and can, at best, only be talked about in terms of the egoic self.

First of all, "destiny" is a problematic concept because it is inherently connected with the past, the future, and the passing of time, and has little or nothing to do with the "infinite" present. In the same way, "free will" only makes sense in terms of the passing of time, but the question of free will is also complicated by the complex web of cause and effect that makes us who we are and so influences and, to a certain extent, predetermines the decisions that we may think we are making of our own "free will".

I suppose you could call this "complex web of cause and effect" a sort of "destiny", but what would be the point? You could also, I suppose, say that both "destiny" and "free will" exist, but again, what would be the point? Does either concept have any impact on the Original Face? Does understanding either help us live our lives in the here and now?

The idea of "karma" seems a bit more useful to me as a concept, sort of a Kosmic cause and effect. The idea that what we do has consequences. But taking either side of the "destiny" vs. "free will" debate seems frought with problems, and trying to blend the two into some sort of compromise belief system seems unnecessarily complicated (and based on two overly simplistic concepts) and ambiguous.

What we should really "believe" in is the infinite, non-dual Oneness, Isness, Suchness (or whatever) and let our awareness of this true Self inform what we do in our daily lives.

Namaste,
~Grey

Day Seven is up, and I think it's a very fitting conclusion to what has been a truly excellent event.

May this be just the first of a long series equally powerful blog-fests!

Grey

Just when you thought the symposium couldn't get any better, check out MrTeacup's essay for Day Seven!

Enjoy!
Grey

Day 5 of the symposium is up! Check it out! I'm on my way there now.

See ya!
Grey