Published Date 6/15/12 1:16 PM

The myths and traditions of Rainbow are not just decorative, they are the very essence of what a gathering is. People don’t simply come together; they come to enact these shared rituals and stories, whether consciously or unconsciously. Yet, these core elements are often neglected or forgotten.

To put an arbitrary measure on this: Most national Rainbow gatherings operate at around 10–20% of what we might call “Rainbow power.” By contrast, European gatherings often reach 40–60%, thanks to a deeper collective memory and stronger enactment of Rainbow values.

At the heart of every Rainbow gathering is a powerful, mostly invisible core of shared myth and tradition. These are not static rules, but living tools, designed to overcome and transcend the “#stupidindividualism” of the Babylon world. And where these tools are remembered and used, they work remarkably well – transforming groups of strangers and misfits into a coherent, caring whole.

The challenge is that this process works as a virtuous circle: If enough power is present at the beginning – meaning people arrive already carrying the stories, practices, and spirit – then the gathering tends to flourish. But if that power is lacking, and the myths are not held or remembered, then incoherence sets in. Fragmentation and conflict tend to dominate instead.

Rainbow gatherings, at their best, offer a glimpse of a different way of being – but only if we collectively remember how to make them live.

Published Date 6/14/12 8:28 AM

The digital tsunami has passed, the washed away sea front of the old media world is being re-built with the usual fast food joints and global burger bars media outlets. Leaving little space left on the fringes for the new media world that hasn’t made the shift into the new mainstream. Traditional media is re-creating itself, contemporary media is withering. Lifestyle, Inaction scwobaling and NGO dispoling failed to fill the space left by the digitization wave. The old media is back, with the renewed vigour of the full digital power, be frightened, be very frightened.

Published Date 6/9/12 8:33 AM

The are meany tools for organizing on the web, few are widely used, most are a flash (a churning) of fashion. Fashionable web evangelist’s will tell you to use that tool or this tool for a job. And each tool is designed to for fill one job.

BUT the most widely used tool on the web is the wiki, and the wiki is not a tool for a particular job rather it is a culture, a society a way of working that solves a “social problem”. The resion all the other tools are just churned over is that they are a product of the dominant mind set, they have a culture but it is not the same culture as the wiki or the web. We constantly mistake the issue as one of tools rather than one of culture. Change your culture not your tool, overcome the churning and actually get something done. Don’t be a fashionable dead head please.

Try a wiki today.

Published Date 6/9/12 8:03 AM

Simferopol’, Crimea, Ukraine.

The hostel I was going to stay in near the railway station was not open. so I had an idea, public transport is very cheap around 20p for a tram or bus ride so looking at my offline map I found a forest near a reservoir close to the edge of town. Got the bus there then walked into the forest till I found a nice space hidden away and pitched my tent for a lovely quirt night sleep. Nicer than a hostel, as the isn’t all the other people making noise and snoring to keep you awake.

In the morning  after breakfast next to the water I just get the tram back to the station. But this plan isn’t as perfect as it seams as on the way back I get a different bus which takes me to the wrong part of town then cant find anyone who speaks some English to find the right bus to the station. For buses and trams its good to have a phone with GPS and an offline map to make shore you aren’t going in the completely wrong direction.

Published Date 5/18/12 5:29 PM

The Rainbow shopping mission (DRAFT)

The gatherings are fascinating places to see very different views of human organising, social institutions and working/broken alternatives to traditional society.

I found that when on a shopping mission you should go with your own crew, to go with an existing crew is a recipe for frustration. The same when in the kitchen, when focalising, an open call for volunteers will make the work twice as hard, better to go the soft organic root of pulling in passing people you have a relationship with as each will come with a task in your mind, a self sense of direction, then few will driftaway. This will “grow” a crew who are motivated and focused.

Hard organising is both bureaucratic and open. Soft organising is closed and nurturing. This is why this first is seen as a natural fit for liberal society and the second held in suspicion. But the second is the one for humane liberation, the hard brings the ones who already have power to the surface and submerged the untouch talent. “Soft organising” makes space for the powerful to step back and surfaces the little sprouting talents, and thus taps into the potential of the majority. From “soft structures” many new flexible hard structures can grow. From hard organising, generally a few brittle structures will temporarily hold a place before dissolving back into the dominant mediocrity.

In intentional communities hard organising is a model with failure built in, this can be fixed to an extent by using soft organising to create hard structures. We can learn a lot from working “disorganisations” such as the rainbow gathering.

Published Date 4/13/12 5:24 PM

It was a good to share skills and ideas with the different groups last night. We introduced a range of programmers and developers to Liferay, and started what is almost certainly the first community bug-fix of a Liferay site in London.

The next London Liferay User meetup will be in June, as next month the Liferay/Zaizi sponsored meetup group has an event on May 2nd. Please join the group if you haven’t already and come along. http://www.meetup.com/official-london-liferay-meetup-group

The project of the Liferay site we were fixing last night, Spring of Code, will be in full development mode at its next meeting on 24th April: presentations, pitches, Q&A, pizza and drinks. So have a look at current projects if you want to know what’s up or get ready to pitch your idea to the group at the next event! http://springofcode.org/projects

Published Date 4/9/12 9:44 PM

Queen Party

21st April (Dalston, London)

Everybody comes as a queen, any queen will do.

Bring rich wine and fine dining.

Gold, swans, hats, handbags, microphones, tight trousers and wig, a tetra.

The royal verity show – performers free, everyone else 20 million $$$$.

RSVP as the queen (any queen will do) for the address.

Published Date 3/28/12 8:22 PM

This is a new 32W panel which is more than my older 25W panel, and runs a bigger laptop

Rugged folding 32.2W solar panel. 18 to 20VDC open circuit voltage. Current 2.4A in full sun. Cigarette socket connector. 16″ X 10″ folded; 14″ X 44″ unfolded. 1 1/2 inches thick folded. 6 pound 4 oz weight. Eyelets at each corner and at panel middle to allow mounting or suspension with rope or bungee cords. Very durable and rugged. Ripstop camouflage nylon enclosure. Take this panel anywhere. No glass. Advantages over thin film: open circuit voltage 18-22VDC (thin film tends to be 15 to 16VDC, as panel heats in sun or if in hot climates voltage for thin film panels drops and you may not charge efficiently or at all). Also thin panels are much less efficient. Substantially larger area for comparable outputs.

This is a 7AH lead acid battery, it is used as a voltage buffer and as a reservoir of power. The cables are a 240v inverter, AA battery charger, Volt meter.

This is a much bigger laptop (14.1″ and i5 proceser) than my usual solar setup, we can eather charger OR power but not both at the same time.

Published Date 3/28/12 8:16 PM

1. What do you propose to do?

Simple automated hyper-local advertising to sustain open projects – the new digital sweetshop window.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?

There are many automated advertising projects, but none for video that are as embedded in the communities they come from. It’s craigslist for video, google adwords for the alternative.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work.

visionOntv creates and trains highly productive hyper-local video news communities, e.g Merseyside Street Reporters Network. These will be the exemplars. Then we expand to sites already embedding our media players and partner with aggregating hubs, followed by local blogs and business websites. The adverts follow the content.

4. Why will it work?

Simplicity and automation: to make an ad, you add an image, title and link to a webpage. You can then choose tags. If the tags are in wide demand they will cost an amount of money, which will initially be very low. These are then served in between content based on user/video geo-location, content tag, and user tags. The viewer will therefore have a close relationship with the ads. The project is built from the bottom up, and has a psychological understanding of peoples’ sense of belonging.

5. Who is working on it?

6. What part of the project have you already built?

visionOntv has 18,000 videos aggregated already, with much of the metadata required. As for local news, Merseyside Street Reporters Network is currently aggregating nearly 500 videos from a single UK city. There is therefore an existing database of curated and tagged geo-located films to hang noticeboard posts off. Beginning with these nodes which we control, we can test solutions to UI / security / spam etc issues. We can also rapidly show a practical outcome.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?

As a distributed project, it has very low running costs. It is a network for income-generation. The key thing is to push the network out and sustain it through the growth phase. We will use flattr as a partial funding model to help with this.