Collaboration Chronicles

Collab21’s wheels have been rusted for a long time now. I just applied some WD-40 and have ordered some grease to repack the bearings.

Our renewed focus is going to be on reaching short term goals rather than our current main goal of moving into a space. Some of these short-term goals are a result of a question posed to me by a principle of the company I work for, “Say you get a space, what are you going to do in it?”

I responded, “I have a prioritized list of 1000s of things.”

“Do those.”

Ideally, I would have a prioritized list of 1000s things to do. In reality, the list is closer to 50. Some of the things on the list actually require having a space, a kitchen, whiteboards, microphones, computers, etc. So I had to eliminate most of the ideas as post-space goals. Of the ones leftover, there were a couple that really stuck out to me:

1. workshops/classes/collaborative work sessions, and
2. Video podcasting

I’ve been working on re-designing our Wordpress theme to fit with the palette of our company’s website, with the idea that it will be the primary site, but will park on top of this one. Ultimately, this will be our primary website.

One of the Wordpress Plugins I added is called Gigs Calendar, which is designed to be used for displaying a list of upcoming gigs for band websites. It was the best calendar I found for free (leave suggestions for others in the comments).

I’ve so far only set up two events. One is a learn to make beer class, the other is collaborative and will be ongoing from now on. My idea of video podcasting is to film the classes, edit them a bit and post them on the blog for free. There will be a list of all classes on a separate page. I think this will be a great benefit for Collab21.com and for the community. Most of the topics I want to have classes on are passions of mine. I’m sure these will inspire more as time goes on.

Jesus teaches survivalism through parables

Finally, I’d like to announce that there will be an ongoing theme of our classes/workshops, which will be roughly related to survivalism. Call it self-sufficiency or life fundamentalism, it’s learning how to take care of your basic needs with limited or basic resources. I live in a city that’s obsessed with local food and I think that is a good thing. People are looking back at their roots. Farming is what made it possible for us to not have to hunt and gather. Our country has for too many years been separated from the things that sustain our lives. Things like water quality, food production, soil, air quality and shelter are extremely broad topics, and it’s few and far between when I meet someone who can speak to all of these things. Our goal is to learn and teach about topics that will change this.

Tags: classes, survivalism, workshop

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under Inspiration, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.