Hi again.

To that review of some emerging new technical potentials, I also wanted to add a review of what appears to be the pending work, that we are expecting to take on the next month or six weeks.

One other modest technical feature that has been emerging for us is the ability to adjust the format of these emails.  So, I thought I would make a couple of slight changes, and see whether this is an improvement.  I forgot to mention in that last email that we have got our Rich Text editor installed into the newsletter system now, which should make it much easier for us to produce high-end html newsletters, somewhat like those beautiful online publications that come from places like Constant Contact.

One reason I wanted to post this additional brief review, is that I just now got a years-end email from the Global Mind-shift project, from their Executive Director Kern Beare.  I have attended a couple of seminars at their facility in Palo Alto, have had a chance to meet Kern Beare, and have taken the liberty of adding him to this little forum.  As this new energy continues to take shape, I am thinking that the Global Mind-Shift project might be a wonderful partner for Interspirit.  They are working in very similar directions, they are a high-end organization doing high-caliber work, and they are in a great location.

I really like this video they put together, on "What is a Mind-Shift?"  I think it's great -- and, one reason I was impressed and fascinated, is that the way this video is composed is very reminiscent of the "dimensional" approach I tend to take -- both in the epistemology, and in the development of this "Portal to Unity" concept.  Take a second to look at this.  It's charming, very nicely done, and expresses a theme that is right to the core of what we are doing here.  And the visuals are great.

http://www.global-mindshift.org/index2.asp

So, what is this work I am anticipating....

Well, we are moving through a lot of creative development.  I want to get these new features on our system as stable as I can get them.  The blog, the rich text editor, and the newsletter, all require some further tuning.  And this new "survey" feature -- is still taking shape.  It's going to be linked, somehow, to the elements of the Portal to Unity (some want to call it "Portal OF Unity...").  This is something that I want to show you, Kern, because you do these wonderful moderated conversations.  This "survey" approach, that allows someone to compose a set of questions, and then send that set of questions to a large audience, who are then able to post their responses to an online database, seems a powerful and fluent way to conduct a high-bandwidth online conversation, without the usual overwhelming flood of emails.

In the email I just received from the Global Mind-Shift project, the subject line is

Global MindShift @ Google: How Technology Can Help Accelerate the Shift to a Global Consciousness 

And this theme is exactly what we are about.  We've got a lot of ideas on how this might happen, and we're looking around for partners.  So, let it flow.  Here in our context, we've got some stuff we might want to show Google, too.

And this Portal to Unity project -- will continue to unfold as these ideas keep flowing in.  Anyone interested can link to a blog that reviews this, which now includes that message I just posted here -- http://lightpages.net/lp/blog.cfm?login=463184&bt=100029

This blog contains a few recent messages, and also includes an article I wrote in 1996 -- entitled COMMON FACTOR -- that outlined my attraction to online database systems, and which led to my connection with Bill Miller, the ESRI executive who first gave me the Cold Fusion programming tools I needed to get started in this line of work.

So -- how CAN technology help accelerate the shift to a global consciousness?

This Portal project is taking shape on this LightPages domain, and still might be seen as a set of notes and basic design ideas.  Where we are going to go, what is going to happen -- is going to depend on who shows up, and who wants to play ball.  But -- it feels like it is going to work, and with the right partners, we might get a very large number of critical simultaneous factors into this framework.  This Portal, Kern, is one more ambitious approach to answering your question.  Gather up every single factor that is impacting this shift process and get them into a single online context, where they can all interact, and where users can quickly build natural groupings by making fast-click selections..  Those Google guys might find that interesting...

You can click this link, and anybody receiving this email can log in and play around with the options. 

http://lightpages.net/portal/portal.cfm?login=463184

After a while, we'll break this down into bite-sized pieces, and send little questionnaires and invitations out to a big audience, who we hope will be excited to be in a converging network process.  Taking this approach, we could conceivably begin to talk to hundreds of separate audiences and organizations, each one playing a role in this "Shift" process, each with some overlapping and essential contribution to make.  The Portal project can help identify ways that all these independent overlapping elements can be combined into unity, while all the participants can remain fully embraced within their own particular organizations and cultural traditions. 

As always, many thanks, many blessings, peace...