Hi All,
I’m Jae, the founder of One Community. Someone emailed me this forum so I joined so I could comment here and address as many of the points as possible. I'll do this to the best of my ability in the order they were presented. If I miss any, feel free to ask your questions and I'll answer them as long as it seems productive.
First off, the feedback on the website is good feedback. We've gotten it before and the sitemap and overview pages were meant to create easy access to the “quantitative” and “substantial" information that has been pointed to within this forum as what is desired. The Highest Good hubs link more directly to that information with a consistent format that includes a directory of icons that link to the detailed pages related to each section. The top-level pages (heavily criticized here) all link to these pages too. Those pages then have indexes at the top that link directly to the open source detailed pages. These hubs are also linked to from the top and side of every page. This creates the "website tree" of Big Picture Concepts (explaining the scope and nature of the project to new people) --> Overview Pages for Each Area of Focus (explaining these areas) --> Detailed Tutorials and Open Source Content
All that said, we hear your feedback that it’s still hard to dig through and we've just started working on a new site (see our weekly updates for progress) that will have a program/component filter function on the homepage that will allow people to jump directly to whatever they are looking for. The hubs will be front and center to also get people directly to that information if pictures are preferable to search filters.
Rebuilding our site is going to take a long time though and we're not even sure if the filter we want can be built the way we want it yet. Ask me in a few more weeks. In the meantime, I'll put in some work on the homepage to make it even clearer how to find the detailed information easier. Right now I'm thinking of a "Start Here" link at the top and adding more clarity to the Overview page as to how the site is organized.
Next point I see is about “Utopia” - we have a whole page on this specific topic:
http://www.onecommunityglobal.org/creating-utopia-on-earth/ It’ll probably generate more negative feedback in this forum, but it is specific to this point. The short summary of that page is that, while it may
not be possible to create a sustainable world that meets the needs of all people, we don’t think this means we shouldn’t still try. Most everything amazing in our world today was criticized and considered impossible by most, yet someone decided to do it anyway and here we are.
Still, we recognize that “utopia” is very different for different people and may not even be desirable for others. The same goes for “Highest Good.” So our philosophy is open source everything in as much detail as possible and people can take what they want and use it or change it how they want to make whatever they want. Using “Highest Good” internally is our way of making sure that we are doing our best to focus on Best Practice as our goal. The specifics of how we define and use "Highest Good" as an organization are here:
http://www.onecommunityglobal.org/for-the-highest-good-of-all/ Others can do it however they want.
Someone said "Being suspicious of utopias is almost always the right call.” My response to this is that I agree. I’d add though that excessive suspicion often creates non-action and can really slow down progress. Our project has tons of pages because we strive for transparency and clarity of our purpose and intent. Each one of those pages is in response to repeated feedback and the goal with writing them all is to provide enough detail so that those who do their research and are willing to read what we’ve written can get involved if they want to. For those who'd rather just watch and wait, we provide all we do so they can see we’ve at least thought of all these points.
Next point I see is about our economic model and how we compensate volunteers. Our economic overview is here, as previously linked by someone else:
http://www.onecommunityglobal.org/highest-good-economics Clicking the icons goes into as much detail as we’ve got so far. It doesn’t cost anything to join our group but we’re a long long way from being funded and our current donations don’t cover operating expenses so the rest is paid for by me. We don’t accept donations from volunteers or core team members.
As for compensating volunteers, we don’t. Everyone is an unpaid volunteer, including me. As I just said, it costs me money to keep this project going and I volunteer full-time on top of that. I believe in our goals and am committed to creating what’s needed so forums like this can be answered with a tangible example rather than more talk. I understand that addressing these points directly here will probably not make a difference to many, so the real goal is to demonstrate it all.
For those who are willing to put time into help us get there faster, we promote them as someone else already outlined and we’re clear about this being how we can compensate people so only people who see that as worthwhile can join. This was criticized as being a sign we’re a scam. It is just transparency about what we have to offer and the reality of our all-volunteer project. Promotion and experience is what we have to offer and people looking for a more capitalist approach aren’t going to be happy volunteering for an organization like ours. Read our application page for volunteers (
http://www.onecommunityglobal.org/collaboration/) and you’ll see we’re even more clear about this because it used to take a lot of time fielding all the emails from people trying to sell us stuff, wanting a job, wanting our project to do work for their project, etc.
Still, we’ve got an amazing group of people that have chosen to join the team and work with us to get as far as we’ve gotten. We also still get a fair amount of sales emails and “do our project for us” letters, but it is much less than it used to be.
The rest of the comments look like their questioning the integrity of myself, project viability, the vision and goals of our project, and our team. You don’t know me and it sounds like the extensive effort we’ve gone through to explain our project, how it’s unfolding, what it’s purposed to accomplish, etc. has (for most of you) had the opposite affect of what we’ve intended. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. My experience though is that it is much easier to sit on the sidelines and complain and criticize things than to take action and work on a solution, becoming the target of such criticism and cynicism.
Knowing this is how it is, our ultimate goal is to be as transparent and detailed as possible as we produce open source starter resources and (eventually) a working prototype including all we’re developing. We invite anyone to join who wants to, don’t accept money to join us, promote and support our helpers as much as we can, integrate to the best of our ability feedback like what I’ve read here, and do our best to create for the good of all people and the planet. We open source it so others can take what they want and do it differently if they like.
Our belief is that by creating for what we feel is the “Highest Good” possible, we’re doing much better than the status quo, and anyone who runs with any of our ideas probably is going to create better than the current paradigm too. We see this as progress and believe that even if we fail to produce the working prototype, we’re still doing way more than the vast majority of organizations with similar goals.
