Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Rainbow Gathering (musings)

:: bioneering project by jim murosako ::

I didn't go to this Gathering, but many FnBers did, and I'm pumping them for information. Satya's group walked the whole way there. The aftermath, involving cleanup, is a kind of Part 2. I got reports about the trash, the detritus, from that many people camped in the forest for that long. The reports make it sound a lot like the Gathering of Western Young Friends but on a much larger scale.

Expanding FnB as a way of training cooks, improving coordination and logistics, using food about to go to waste anyway, seems like a good idea. I'm surprised how below the radar it stays, given so many chapters.

I wonder about this Quaker network of safe houses or whatever it is. LW and my friend, another chef, are thinking about scoping out more of Yamhill county. I sent an email ahead, to one of the property owners. There's no substitute for reality. Dreams without substance accrue no inertia.

I was thinking back to my research into Unicode and OLPC today. Sinhalese and Tamil were on my screen at CubeSpace, seems a long time ago by now. I alluded to that chapter in my recent post to edu-sig. The entire thread is interesting I think, relates to diversity (I have related threads going on both Diversity and PSF-members).

Should Global U students travel more? Many of the more conscious and aware types, such as those in my current household, think a lot about peak oil. We mostly walk, bike, take the bus, though I gladly do chauffeur duty (company car) for the 82 year old.

Adding more electronics and doing more virtual meetups still seems like a realistic way to go. But again, there's no substitute for reality. Sometimes one really needs to go to a place, to broaden one's perspective.

We should probably run these conveyor belts faster, get more turnover going. But that takes software. I've imagined CSN as a supportive business, but one can't live on coffee shop fare, if that means your standard airport concourse coffee shop (which CSN shops are not -- some may require membership).

One needs to have substantive protein. Lyrik does a lot of its own baking. Jody may have known about Calibri's operation but I was too new to CSA (community supported agriculture) to grok the background story.

The idea of a disaster relief corps is already well established with AFSC. Of course the vast majority aren't Friends, but you may still find a lot of your own plans and dreams mirrored, just in a different namespace. Happens all the time.

Should we take applications? Who else wants to join our Global U project? Metaphorically, it's what we're already involved in (Global U = Spaceship Earth), but on the ground you have all kinds of resource and personnel allocation strategies. LW used to read resumes a lot, back in Savannah. She might help select her own replacement for when the time comes to change the scenery (scene), not saying I'm bound here either (turnover is a fact of life).

Alex, newly a US citizen, said photography and cinematography were discouraged at the Gathering, so I may not find as much on Flickr as I'd hoped. Burning Man, in contrast, is well covered by photography.

As I was mentioning tonight, if the goal is community, then your designers need to know right away if you're accommodating the very young (newborns) and the elderly. There's a tendency among the young to think in terms of their generation as the anchor. However, many of these communities would likely happen more quickly if the seniors saw them as a solution as well. Segregation by age has its consequences.

Lots of anthropology branches off from these rather scattered remarks.