Sunday Agenda
- Check in
- Review WWWs
- Daily Practice/Metrics
- Weekly event logistics
- Review Agenda
- Newsletter
- Aspirations for the SolSeed service
- SolSeed lessons for little kids
- Strategic Planning
- SolSeed Village/Business
- Geodesic Sphere Rain Dancers
Check-in (gratinews)
- Brandon … I'm in a contemplative mood
- Eric … I’m in a dreamy mood, I’ve been dreaming of geodesic spheres
- Ben … I got my vacation almost completely planned (in terms of travel) and that used up most of my motivation for the weekend, but I did create a new page on http://gaia.
WW(W)s from last time
Organize the WWWs by person and then due date. We’ll start checking in on topical community protocol and meditation for each mini-period between workbees.
Holacracy founder Brian Robertson says these are bad: http://holacracy.org/blog/the-insanity-of-the-what-by-when
- Eric … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing
- Eric … read last attempt at Village documents including Vision Workshop and SolSeedVillage#Governance Draft … by next call
- Eric … Post the Utopia blog post on the blog … by Thursday
- Eric … buy air pump and air sterilizer … by Spring Equinox
- Eric … talk to Tim Blais about Indiegogo .. by next call
- <s>Brandon … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing</s>
- <s>Brandon … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing</s>
- Ben … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- <s>Ben … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing
- Ben … investigate getting a SolSeed bank account and credit card … by next Sunday</s>
WWWs
- Brandon … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Brandon … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing
- Brandon … check the links in the newsletter … by Monday
- Ben … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Ben … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing
- Ben … send out the newsletter … by Thursday
- Eric … meditate and keep track of which days ... ongoing
- Eric … follow your topical community protocol for this period ... ongoing
- Eric … review Ben's draft newsletter … by tonight
- Eric … Post the Utopia blog post on the blog… by next call
- Eric … talk to Tim Blais about Indiegogo .. by next call
- Eric … buy air pump and air sterilizer … by Spring Equinox
- Eric … write a Sabbath School lesson plan … by next week
Daily Practice (from Sunday to Sunday)
- https://tdp.me/person/brandon-cs-sanders
- https://tdp.me/person/EricOfSolseed
- https://tdp.me/person/SciFiBen
2014-01-11 to 2014-01-17: 26+19+27 =72 checkmarks
Metrics (from Sunday to Sunday)
0 … articles published (blog, etc) 2 … net signups to the newsletter for the week (100 total) 0 … conversants from signup (people we are talking or emailing with) 0 … bios added to the wiki by conversants 4 … articles added to Gaia.wiki 20 … sessions on Gaia.wiki other than us 126 … sessions on Spacewiki.com 67 … sessions on SolSeed.org 1+1+3=5 … topical community touches 72 … daily practice checkmarks for the week
Weekly Events Logistics
Weekend Service rotation: Eric, Shelley, Brandon, Ben
- January 24 Service: 9:00 AM PDT, 12:00 EST (Shelley)
- January 25 Work-Bee: 5:30 PM PST, 20:30 EST
Midweek
- January 22 Work-Bee: 6:30 PM PST, 21:30 EST (Brandon may be out celebrating Shelley's mom's birthday)
Newsletter
Brandon and Eric will review Ben's draft
- Brandon read the text and loves it (he was effusive in his appreciation of Ben’s work), but still wants to check the links
Aspirations for the SolSeed service
- Brandon: We've fallen into a comfortable pattern … I wanted to think about what happens to the service if we grow and change, e.g. if we get 100 times bigger and have an in-person "congregation"
- Eric: I'm not sure I'm comfortable thinking about a couple hundred people … let's imagine a dozen people who come regularly
- Our checkins and discussion after the reading would get really long and clunky
- It maybe wouldn't feel as much like a service, more like a discussion group
- We'd probably have to curtail both segments to something very simple
- Eric: If we had a place for a congregation (maybe renting rather than owning it):
- we'd have to separate our online (skype) from the in-person … the people on skype become observers rather than participants
- we'd have really big flashy rituals, e.g. a Viventibus Galaxia plate with arms reaching out into the audience, so people feel more a part of it
- we'd have more of a Pagan feel to our service (in contrast to UU)
- I feel less called to the “present from the pulpit” and more called to the Pagan circle and participatory model
- Ben: One possibility is that the 20-40 people will be in ten or twelve different locations and it will be largely video conference, because we might need to cast the net widely to find people who will join.
- Two options for how this would work:
- Sanders’s home becomes the locus where all the cool ritual paraphenalia and stuff happens
- Everyone who comes has all of the ritual stuff and participates
- I guess I’m more attracted to the everyone participates version, but I think some people will have more difficulty than others getting all of the elements together
- We could mail galaxy plates and ammonite fossils to people
- I would be sad to curtail the discussion part. And I think it might not be a big issue because there are many who don’t speak up a lot. I’d agree that we probably wouldn’t do detailed checkins.
- We might want to invest in some more complex video conferencing where people break out into subgroups.
- Ben: I hope some day we’ll have a nice cathedral-like structure that will both provide space for a large group and attract attention to us from the outside world (thus helping to build a larger group)
- Brandon … This comes out of my observations of my kids at our services, UU services and Seventh Day Adventist services. The 7th Day model works best for the kids. It has a sabbath schools before the service with an adult guiding and it has a lot of singing, putting stuff in other stuff, moving around, sitting in chairs, boats
- Associated with the date is a lesson (example) where everyone in the country is using the same lesson. The whole thing works better than ours for the kids because of the Sabbath School piece.
- Things I like about it are there are preplanned lessons set ahead of time for the whole year (1 per week), and each week there's lots of repetition and a memory verse. The lesson includes activities done throughout the whole week ahead of time.
- I imagine that we could attract families if we had a good space and this kind of model but with our values.
Blue Hat
- Brandon: Let's have a listener, a talker, and an observer (note taker), and rotate those roles every few minutes
General discusson
- Brandon: The fact that we've done these rituals hundreds of times is really something … I want to challenge us to decide where we want to end up and what a next step toward that would look like
- Eric: I’m excited by the idea, I’m not sure how big we’ll have to get before we’ll attract those kind of people … in our own area UU is having a hard time attracting families … it’s a kind of critical mass issue … they keep attracting families (they do RE, another term for Sabbath School) … they have something ready but then not enough kids show up (it’s like 1 kid with the facilitator) … and then families stop showing up … it’s not really an RE program
- Brandon: At our congregation there are at least a dozen kids, and it basically was just childcare with a little chalice-lighting ceremony … no substance
- UU model: creating a service for old people and having something somewhere else at the same time for the kids … I don't think it works nearly as well as the SDA model … UUs might not be able to muster the commitment it takes to do the SDA model
- Eric: Yeah, UU people would probably end up not doing the homework during the week
- Brandon: The hardship, sacrifice for the group, is what makes it work
- Brandon: Could we pilot this in Portland or in our service? I don't know what the next steps are yet
- Ben: just caught up on my usual "change is hard" … we haven’t finished the big holacracy change and we’re trying to do something at the same time
- Eric: I’d be willing to write a three pager like this SDA one (a one week lesson)
SolSeed Village/Business
Eric: we’ve been working for a while on the SolSeedVillage and I’d like to share an idea I’ve got that would be an addition to the geodesic floating cities one (which we've currently dropped from our list of ideas to develop). The idea would be to build reasonably small ones and what they would do would be automated, pre-programmed to land on the ocean where there was good weather. Collect some sea water. The top half would be clear and the bottom black and they’d have a solar still so they’d take on sea water and create fresh water. Float up into the sky and float over an area that needs fresh water and dump their fresh water.
- Ben: so they wouldn’t have any ability to control their motion through latitude and longitude.
- Eric: they would just have map of where the needs are, and would drift.
- Ben: building the solar still on the ground and having a pipe go where it is actually needed seems like a more efficient version of this idea.
- Eric: pipes have to grow across land and you’ve got to guard it, etc. Every idea I’ve ever had about more powerful desalenator doesn’t end up scaling well when you have to pipe it.
- Ben: what about having them be zeppelins with propellers?
- Eric: it’s an extra expense but you might get better efficiency out of them as well. You could certainly concentrate their work in a smaller area and have more of an effect.
- Brandon: I think this is fascinating idea, what size were you thinking?
- Eric: they’d have to be multiple meter minimum and I think we’d probably want to build them larger. Of course you’d want to build a lot of them and have them be reasonably cheap. 4-5m would be a good size to start with and then we’ll see how well they work. Start with a test one that is tethered, it’s just dropping water back in it’s lake.
- Brandon: Where does the salt go?
- Eric: You just dump the ultra-salty water back into the ocean after removing most of the water from it.
- Ben: Would this be bad for Gaia if we scaled it up too much? Life may have worked really hard to keep the oceans from getting saltier.
- Eric: I don't think it would have a big effect. It just reverses a bit of the freshening effect from melting glaciers, and we're just capturing some of the water that was evaporating off the ocean surface anyway. If we could make the ocean significantly saltier, we could use it to prevent the Gulf Stream from stalling due to all the fresh water melting off of Greenland and the northern ice cap.
- Brandon: I see a publicity payoff from doing this.
- Eric: Yeah, we could do a kickstarter and put contributors' logos on the devices.
Evaluation
- Brandon … I think we have choices and that is a really privileged place to be
- Sequoia … I made a robot out of lego with a Brain in a Jar on it
- Ben … I feel like we should put some sort of generally planning thing on our strategic planning so we don’t just look at whatever is shiny in the moment
- Eric … I like looking at shiny things