It's Siona. :)

Last week, I was talking with the rest of the team about Mother's Day, brainstorming about what we might do on the site in honor of the upcoming weekend. Something to honor Gaia? A QaR about mothers? Perhaps a call for stories or pictures?

It was Jessica who reminded us of something we've all been aware of for a while. Our quotations library is embarrassingly out-of-balance: the majority of the quotations in it are by men. (And not only are there only two woman in the 'Popular Authors' section of the quotes page, one of them happens to be listed under a male pseudonym!)

So we thought that, this week, in honor of our mothers, we might all work to contribute some women's wisdom to the quotations library. If you'd like to help (and you would, wouldn't you?) just grab a few books by your favorite female authors and pop over to the 'Add a Quote' section.  (If you need help, there are more detailed instructions here.)

Let's see whether we can get a little more equal represenetation by next week. :)

And while I'm here, a few bits of behind-the-scenes news...

First off, I wanted to apologize, tremendously, for the site slowness over the past weekend. We're working on figuring out what caused the evening dips, and what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again. Those occasional drags are really, really not good for my heart; I don't like thinking of anyone struggling to get on the site or wondering what the lags are about. So again, I apologize, and we are working on it.

Secondly, I've been speaking with Dave about our advertising on the site. We're losing a painful number of potential sponsors because we don't take rich media, and while there's no way we're going to re-implement those flashy little gifs on the right hand side, w'ere going to try a few top banners that move (for no longer than three seconds—then they go still). We're also planning on re-working the interior navigation (remember how Jackson did such a great job with the tabs up top? We think the interior could be simplified as well...) and there'll be some potential then to change the many square ads on the site to something less jarring. Also, for those of you who are truly bothered by the ads, we still do offer Plus, which allows you to turn them on and off at will.

And last but not least, we've got a site-wide event coming up in May! I posted a bit of news about this on my own blog, but for the rest of you, we'll be hosting a TeleGathering with Gay Hendricks and his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, on the topic of Authentic Relationships. We've got it scheduled for the evening of May 20th, and we'll let you know soon when and how to sign up. (Yes, it'll be free for all members of the site.) Obviously I'm giddy about this; imagine us all being on one line together. Ee.

Again, though, if you have a minute to spare this week, please do consider adding some women to our quotes database. There's so much wisdom out there, and so must to listen to... and, on that note, if you'd like to let us know what else you're doing for mother's day, by all means share!

I think this is my favorite holiday. :)

Alhough the inspiration for Earth Day is at the very core of why we're here, we're not going to offer a list of recommendations for how you should spend your week, or what you should do (if you are interested in finding an event in your area, the Earth Day Network has literally thousands of options, as well as recommendations for taking action). Instead, we'd love to ask a smaller favor—a favor in the spirit of Gaia.

This is a holiday! It's a time of celebration and observance and reverence and wonder.

It's a time to go outside and wriggle your bare feet in the grass and to stand beneath the open sky and throw your arms wide and to lean against the wind.

It's a time to watch the sun set and to think of the comforting steadyness of this incredible planet as it cycles quietly through space, and the beauty of how we can trust those perfect circles.

It's a time to pause on the sidewalk and watch as those little pieces of grass and spring come pushing through the cracks in the cement, and to be spellbound by the force of new life.

It's a time to appreciate your own animalness and the way the cycles of your own body (from the dailiness of waking and sleeping to the minutes of breathing and heartbeats to the seasonal changes of aging) are so deeply in tune with the planet that holds us.

It's a time to celebrate all these crazy earthly miracles that we so easily take for granted.

So wherever you are, whether it's bright and springlike or raining and grey, whether morning or evening or late in the day, please please please remember to celebrate the sheer wondrousness of the world. Take a lesson from the city pigeons and the prickly pears and the golden dandelions and the ants and anteaters and antelopes, and just BE for a while. Be in life, and in celebration, and in love, and allow, for a time, the whole world love you back. :)

Happy Earth Day, again and again and again.

Hugs and love and so much appreciation,
Siona
& the rest of the Gaia Team

PS. If you've posted a blog entry about the day, or want to recommend a Group or discussion or photo or book, please just leave a note in the comments...

Hello Gaia!

So there's a new little button up at the top for those of you with Gaia+ accounts. Your usual 'internal' messages can still be found by clicking on the little icon (the speech bubbles) next to your name (which links to your profile) in the upper right, but for those subscribers with @gaia.com email addresses, we've made it easier to check your mail. (Chris has also added a few updates to the Resonance Engine, so make sure—if you've got that box on your profile—to check it out. :)

Jessica's been working on a plan to revitalize the Ambassadors program; this month we'll be launching a new Group for Gaia Ambassadors, with a new invitation to join and a snazzy new packet of guidelines and ideas for those of you who're passionate about the general energy and mission of connection and positivity and contribution and heart behind this space, and who want to do more to enhance it here and in the world 'outside.' Hopefully it'll be a fun cause to rally around, and we're excited about doing more to empower those of you who love the idea of this community and what it means.  But more on this next week!

There've been some lovely reports from the Gaia Gatherings that happened for Conversation Week 2008... but if you missed the opportunity to host one of those get-togethers, all is not lost. It's still perfectly possible to pop a note to a member or two in your area and invite them for conversation—and to explore a bit the hearts and concerns of those others around you. (Exploring, I think, is a good word for this... it's a little like going out into the world in hopes of discovering something new, but instead you're exploring a shared inner landscape. And it would be one thing if this sort of activity remained contained between the two of you, but I've found very real projects can arise as a result—and if nothing else, that practice of understanding can make such a difference in the world.)

Also, though many of you are likely familiar with James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis (that is, the scientific theory that posits the Earth as a living thing), you might not have seen Peter Russell's articulation of Gaia and the role of human beings in the ongoing evolution of the planet. There's a short video of his thoughts here. I already posted a personal blog entry about it, but the movie touched me deeply and it feels wonderfully relevant to the community as a whole. If you have a minute, do go have a look. To my mind it makes the critical importance of the connections found here so, so clear.

Hugs until the next time,
Siona

Gaia!!

You've probably noticed a few minor changes on the site since yesterday. We just deployed a new release (as we do most Wednesdays), and while it included mostly bug fixes, there were a few other litlte tweaks made as well.

If you'll look up to the right, you'll see that a portion of the navigation bar has been made into a little drop-down menu. Your messages and profile can still be reached in one click, but the rest of the links now neatly tucked away. It's a little cleaner, no?

We've also removed the 'glow' button from your profiles. We'd initially hoped those little beacons would serve to help get a sense of someone's familiarity and participation and level of involvement with the community—similar to the way in which many online forums show the number of post someone's made—but came to the conclusion that the beacons weren't the best way to do this. (Ideas are welcome! :)

The next bit of news has to do with Gaia⁺. We'll be contacting those of you who've already signed up to let you know how to set up and access your new @gaia.com email account... and next week, any new subscribers will automatically get one. I'm ridiculously excited about this—who wouldn't prefer @gaia.com to @gmail.com? ;)

Our Gaia Gatherings around Conversation Week 2008 are flowing nicely. (I'm going to the one Mark's hosting tonight.) There's still time to put together your own, too; searching for someone from your city or state and inviting them for a discussion on one of the 10 questions of Conversation Week takes mere minutes, and it would be wonderful if you could add your story to the myriad other strange and wonderful connections that others have already discovered. 

And what else? One of our members did an interview with me about Gaia Community, so if you'd like to hear what I sound like, pop over to Todd Goldfarb's wonderful "We The Change" site. (I know. I love the name too!) His blog and podcasts are both excellent and very, very much in alignment with the energy and spirit of our site here. It's beautiful. :)

Big hugs, all, as always, and more soon!
Siona

Hello Gaia!

We'll be doing a little behind-the-scenes work on the site super-early tomorrow, so if you tend to spend time here at odd hours or if you're traipsing in from another time zone, be aware that you'll get a 'Gaia is dreaming' message from 2 am to 4 am MST.

For those of you interested in what's going on, well, we're breaking down a giant table of meta-data into a number of constituent tables so as to increase performance.

Gaia Community, as you might imagine, is far, far more complex than your standard web page; instead of just consisting of a few different elements and images, this site has connections and profiles and posts and photos are all woven together in a vast tapestry of information.

When you log in to your profile, Gaia needs to know to bring up the friends you're connected to and the posts you've made to your blog. She needs to get your library shelved and your quotes compiled and your photos in order and the Groups you've created organized, and to do this not just for a few people, but tens of thousands, all of whom are posting and connecting and reconnecting and sending messages and notes and stories, and not just that, but who are all interconnected as well. It's an exponential and vastly complicated process, and a bit of work for the servers (not to mention the code!), and due to the nature of the interdependence of all our connections and conversations, a tiny glitch in any one of those threads can ripple all throughout the pages. In breaking these tables down, we're making it so that Gaia doesn't need to search through millions and millions of fields to grab one piece of information, but instead can go to a sub-set and thus work a bit more quickly.

I get a bit amazed at the almost neurological intricacy of this community, and amazed, too, at the developers: this site, when it comes down to it, started as just a few typed-out lines of code. Talk about writing a whole world into being...

(And I get all the more amazed to think of all of you who've participated in this writing. It's crazy, hm? All this, flowing from our fingertips onto the keyboard. It's a crazy universe we live in.)

Anyway. We'll be down for a bit whilst working on that, but hopefully it's at an hour that won't interrupt too many postings.

I'll post again soon (we've got news about Plus... gaia.com email addresses, anyone!?) and more about Conversation Week, a few updates about a new goals / values section we're working on, and some polishing of the interior navigation, but for now, just think good thoughts for our hardworking, late-night dev team. They can always use a little extra love. :)

Posted by: Siona

Hello Gaia!

How are we going to change the world? 

Together.

Aren’t you always amazed by the quality of members here on Gaia? I’m always so impressed. I’m even more impressed when I meet a fellow member face to face and have the opportunity to share a bit of tea and conversation.

And, I find conversations with Gaia members are always meaningful. Those conversations change me. They broaden my perspective, and sometimes they catalyze action that changes my life.

That’s why Gaia is promoting Conversation Week from March 24th - 30th. This is effort was created by Conversation Café and designed to inspire people to come together and discuss 10 of the most important questions facing the world, voted on and chosen by the public. (Don’t you love democracy?)

Here’s their description:

Conversation Week 2008 is a celebration of the power of conversation to change the world. Hosts will convene face-to-face, small-group conversations with friends, neighbors, and strangers. The goal is to empower people worldwide to convene a meaningful, respectful discussion in their community.

And, it’s going to happen all around the world during the last week of March.

Wow. Powerful.

I can’t think of anyone better to share world changing conversations than Gaia members.. That's why we're hoping to inspire a Gaia Gathering Week during these dates, so that we can combine our efforts and ensure that this community, too, can join together around these key questions.

It doesn’t matter what kind of event you host. It can be 2 people or 200 people. It can be as simple as reaching out to another member in your area and chatting over coffee. The goal is to reach out in the community and have as many face to face conversations as possible.  It can be simple. It can be whatever you want it to be.

If you’ve never hosted an event before, no worries! We’re here to help and coach you through it. And, Conversation Café is here to help too. They are training hosts and empowering people to create conversation. You can always contact the team for help and I can be reached at Jessica@gaia.com.

On a personal note, I don’t think there’s anything more powerful that creating community and bringing people together for a positive purpose. We can’t change the world alone. We need each other. Miraculous things happen when good people connect.

Once you’ve started planning your conversations, events, & tea times let us know! Send me a note and post about in the comments of this blog. You can also post and connect in our Gaia Gathering pod. Please don't forget to pop over to the Conversation Café site and post your event with them and take advantage of one of their many scheduled facilitator trainings.

Don’t forget to take photos, videos, and blog about what you shared during the conversation. It helps inspire the whole community. You can find more tips for planning here.

We’ll be hosting an online Gathering featuring the Top Ten Questions in our Questions &Reflections for the whole week. So, you can participate on the site too!


Posted by: Jessica

Hello Everyone.

As you've probably noticed by now we have a new feature on Gaia Community called myGaia. It's our version of Netvibes (or iGoogle for those Googlephiles). You can now add widgets to customize your Gaia home page.

You could use widgets to keep track of everything that's happening within the Gaia Community. It gets better, though. As some of you already know, the real power of myGaia involves feeds! This means that members can "pull in" any content from the Web and put it in their myGaia pages.

(For those who are new to feeds, check out this Feed 101 crash course by FeedBurner.)

Allow me to show you an example. Below is a snapshot of my customized myGaia page.



(click to zoom in)

As you can see, I've customized my page to include Gaia Questions and Reflections, Gaia Quotes, Meditation Room, Weather, New York Times  headlines, and of course, my favorite RSS feeds I've created via Google Reader (i.e. technology, fluffy-blogs, green-blogs). Neat.

Here's how to add features (or widgets) on your myGaia page.

HOW TO: Add Features (or widgets) to myGaia

Want to change theme of your myGaia page? Easy.

HOW TO: Change the theme of myGaia

We're still in the early phase of our implementation of myGaia, so please report any bugs or glitches on the Gaia support board. In the meantime, go ahead. Give it a try. Plug in your favorite feeds. Feel free to play around. More Gaialicious things to come!

(posted by: ~C4Chaos)

Hello beautiful Gaia people.

Jessica here.

You may know that Gaia offers four scholarships a year to four (two at a time) inspiring individuals striving to change the world and live audaciously and authentically. A huge part of our mission is to help you change the world and these scholarships are one small way we try to support good people doing good things.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to the winners of our Change the World Scholarship 2007. (drum roll)

Meet Eryka. She’s a mother of four (!) going back to school and preparing for law school, hoping to specialize in adoption. We asked two essay questions of our applicants, What would you do if you weren’t afraid? and How are you going to change the world? I’d like to share some quotes from Eryka’s essay because they speak for themselves:

Fear has kept me from realizing my full potential. It once convinced me that It was more powerful than I am. As a result, my expectations became limited and my world shrank until all that remained was the daily struggle to make it from sunrise to sunset. But, the universe is perfect in its balance, and one day, it came to me that the one thing greater than Fear is Hope. In that instant I began to grow. My hope for a better life has empowered me to dream and take the steps necessary to manifest the destiny I have chosen for myself.

Um. Wow.

And how is she going to change the world?

For me, practicing law is more than a dream; it is a conviction. The idea that I could spend my life uniting parents and children is exciting and gratifying because I know that when a child is provided with a warm and nurturing environment, their potential to grow is unlimited. This project is immense and I am only one person with a vision, but I have faith that my path will certainly change the world for the individuals I help. When I think of rescuing children I have yet to meet, I also think of the adults they may become. Perhaps one of them will grow to do great things for the world in their own right…then my work would be complete.

Please feel free to say hi to her and check out the ridiculously cute baby photos on her profile.

Next, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Brittany. She’s a photographer and documentary maker. When we confront our fears, I think we open up the way to triumph over them. It’s the honesty about our fears that allows us to overcome. Here is a quote from Brittany:

I am afraid others may not be impacted by the depth that my documentaries show. I fear they may not be good enough to be published. Despite winning best documentary at my college and having the Chief Editor of the Sacramento Bee love my documentary, I still fear there is more work that needs to be done. In today's world, people are quick to judge without taking the time to understand. My work needs to send the right message quickly to others.

We all have fears and it take courage to share them with sincerity and to continue on the path despite them, which is clearly what Brittany is doing…

Photography leaves an imprint on your mind whether you like it or not. It is remembered. It plants little seeds in your head sprouting growth and in most cases, compassion. It can and has changed the world... I would love to continue that.

Stop by her profile and check out her beautiful photography.

I just want to note, that we had thousands of submissions for this scholarship. There were so many wonderful entries and it was hard to choose. We wish the very very best for all of those who applied and are out there fulfilling their dreams, making this world better and brighter.

Posted by: Jessica