At the end of the day, my day anyway, it is all about people. How do we connect, communicate and collaborate? If that went well I had a great day.
Yesterday I had GCC Zoom sessions trying to realise just that. And it covered the full spectrum between my desperate sense of isolation and this warm flood of belonging.
The exploration of how to be, do and decide together requires all my capacities, my reasoning, feeling, sense making and acting.
The GCC attracts many smart and sensitive people, aware of the great survival challenge cause by the rigged extraction system we live in. That is an immense pool of intelligence, ideas, creativity and experience. Sam Hahn defined one of the downsides as the smart people problem. I labeled the pattern Swarm Stupidity.
The second session this Friday was an interesting exploration into these dynamics. Watch this video to get a feel for the complexity and the strength of the intention to sort it out and make sense of it leading to the proper decisions and actions.
The definition of a good decision seems to depend on the maturity of the decision makers. This demands adult behaviour.
The first session was more focused on the function and structure of the collective website, https://globalchallengescollaboration.org/
The proposal Joshua offered and created was a central WordPress website and a personal WordPress Blog for every participant. (You currently reading this on mine.)
So like a mothership in cyberspace with many interlinking other virtual vessels.
I like and support this idea. This way the content created stays under my control and does not vanish on the timeline of facebook or another commercial social platform.
I still am on the beginning of the learning curve, but I am motivated to master this.
So following what I learned from William Charlton I share my current concept of the GCC website structure in the form of a proposal.
As Heidi suggested I would like to keep the front landing page short, sweet and simple. Clarity on the (current) purpose of the GCC and the function of the site are key. And then of course the people with what they bring and desire. As I said, at the end of the day, my day anyway, it is all about people. How do we connect, communicate and collaborate?
So just three entry points. Anyone interested can quickly find more following these links into the site. I would design all other features like active discussions (forums), the archive of discussions (videos) and all other around this main structure.
One exception could be this last suggestion at the end of this Friday session on decision making. A simple link to the donation option is obvious, simple and probably very rewarding:
Your feedback is very welcome in the comment section below. Thank you for your kind attention.
making things visible 
Hi Harry, since the beginning of the year, I was looking into and hoping to do something like you’re proposing now, and in fact the GCC portrayed itself as a candidate to work on such project, but it became quite clear that you guys who are on live Zoom calls rather figure out everything yourselves the hard way without a “technologist” present. Fine for me, I don’t want to play in that game any more, but I strongly recommend a mechanism to report errors/bugs/suggestions and have it actually manned and acted upon, because all the unnecessary breakage and loss happening along the way render the experience very annoying, way before any realization of potential.
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On newa.info, you have it sort-of already, another thing to wonder about.
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Thank you Stephan. I would love to discuss this with you as you are clearly more experienced in this that I probably am. I am reading this at the end of the evening, so today is done for me. Could you indicate what your preferred channel of communication is beside writing?
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art was stolen today … a mothership and several baby ships have been copied… TY
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Harry, I really love your pictures which are a relief of too many words. Not that I wouldn’t appreciate your writing, I do it very much, but altogether in the live sessions too much time passes for too many words and tons of deviations and non-clarity about what the topic is – or was planned to be.
I love the connection part, it is very valuable, and I really appreciate your contributions there, verbally and visually and your courage to show up as a human being without the need to show a smart and experienced ego to the others. Hopefully your example will be picked up as a model for others!
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Hi Harry, seems like the comment system doesn’t support replies going deeper than 3 levels, maybe for good reasons, now the thread is going to be messed up regardless.
I don’t have a lot of experience in that regard (other than programming some simple user account management), it looks like with newa.info you already have somebody who implemented more or less what you’re proposing, and by now, with the member profiles on globalchallengescollaboration, very recently another variant has been realized. The page had some member pictures on the front page for some time which weren’t really profiles, but still a start, which is gone now, and you too have a list of people in one of your blog posts. That’s an improvement in comparison to a few days ago.
However, it’s not too difficult to come up with an expanded vision of what it could be. I registered many user accounts on many websites, and every time I have to enter the same information over and over again, which then gets outdated, so I would like to set up my profile on a central location under my control and have other sites pull from it. One could set expiration durations, manage different profile contexts that define what data gets presented, link contributions/activities to such an identity and add identities as described by the profile to groups for matching etc. It’s not too difficult to build it, but most of existing applications and services are not designed to interoperate via semantic data descriptions, which can easily be observed for all the existing places of GCC member profiles that exist somewhere right now. Should we start to work on it? I don’t think there’s enough pain/gain in contrast to just duplicate the data in bad quality everywhere, and there are other more interesting or urgent projects to work on.
Online audio/video works under some circumstances, there’s the Ekiga softphone for example, but with standardized + libre-freely implemented device access moving into browsers, Skype/Hangout/Meet also have web clients that sometimes even allow group rooms to join as guest without account, I also did some livestreaming (which is one-way) or recorded audio/video (for the latter, I would like to develop a non-real-time dialogue application, but not realisticly any time soon). There might be other channels I fail to think of right now, like meeting in physical space, traditional telephone? If it’s not digital, I’m not much in favor of it.
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Hi Harry, from your first image, I finally was able to chose a working model for what intelligence is. In an article I tried to explore what artificial intelligence might be, so one has to ask as well what intelligence actually is, and what kind of intelligence computers, animals plants and stones might have. Now I think that intelligence is the ability to manage complexity, to various degrees. What would be the most primitive intellectual task for one to perform? 1+1? Way too difficult because it’s on an abstract level, but maybe something like keeping a thought for more than a second, in a world that constantly changes all the time. I think that complexity doesn’t grow, that it is always there and we just discover more of it, but can also forget/ignore/abstract away/master some of it as well. I don’t imagine it as a chaotic mess like you’ve drawn it, but I get the idea, in comparison to the simple linear line of the ground (not that the guy and the line and the spaces in between are of almost infinite complexity themselves). It could be that the person portrayed isn’t very intelligent and didn’t manage to bring some order into the mess of confusion. Also, the virtual model in the brain is a result of what has been observed in the seemingly simple 3D space.
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I finally got to reading your blog post (without comments). “…at the end of the day, my day anyway, it is all about people. How do we connect, communicate and collaborate?”
I’m fully aligned with you on this. Personally, I find that too much reading and writing brings me more sense of isolation, and prevents cultivating connections. I’ve recently discovered GCC and I like you’ve integrated video calls into your rhythm – but I don’t really have time of need to watch recorded videos. I’m actively involved with REconomy practitioners local to global virtual community of practice. We never recorded our online events so far because we don’t want to create content to be “consumed” later.
I guess my / our approach is more about “oral culture”: https://medium.com/virtual-teams-for-systemic-change/why-oral-culture-64c16a300135
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