have a recording of this call. This is the generative commons call on Wednesday, July 7th, 2021. I have to remember which of the calls this is. Hi, Judy. You preparing breakfast? Yeah, I'm working on breakfast, so I'm probably going to go off camera just for a little while while I eat. No worries. No worries. Thanks for being here. Stacy and I were just reflecting on the social nature of what's going on. And she was commenting on the series Halt and Catch Fire, which is about geeks having fun. And it's interesting, because a lot of people, a lot of left-brain thinkers, typical type X managers or whatever you want to call it, either don't think there's a lot of value in community, whatever that is, or think that it can be brought up on command. And then we need a community. So then we'll just snap our fingers and go up. And it ain't, and it don't, and it's not. And so trying to figure our way out, in some sense, community first is interesting. Well, one of the thoughts that I've been having recently had to do with how might we look at all the different things we're doing and try to actually set up a short project plan for three to six months of exactly what it is we plan to get done and what the metrics would be to demonstrate that we had success. Because I think we need to move into the implementation phase. And it almost doesn't matter what corner of the elephant you start watching, as long as you have an experiment going and you're trying to do something and getting people to work together collectively to do it, then hopefully result will accrue. And then you'll be able to see what the next logical step would be. So funny you should mention that. Pete made a suggestion yesterday. I had just a one-on-one call with Pete. And he had a great suggestion that was really quite simple and made a whole bunch of sense. Because in trying to raise funds for OGM, I'm trying to raise funds for OGM fellows or fellowships, which is a complicated thing.  And then fellowships tend to last a long time. So when do you say, hey, what you're doing isn't working or how it tends to be a little bit strange? So he said, how about instead of that, raising funds for OGM projects? And thinking about it as projects. And then each project gets staffed with the different kinds of people who bring their special magic arts. Each project has deliverables for the commons under the rules of the generative commons agreement. And that way we can support the people we know are building stuff. And we can sort of help guide their efforts to feed the commons. That's splendid. We've had a lot of groundwork late actually with what we already did in the larger preparation for Lyonsburg. I think we hung up in the complexity of trying to project plan each thing separately. But if we view it not as a longer run project plan, but as a three or six month sprint, which means it's definitely discreet. And we should walk and run and demonstrate to ourselves and the world that we can do something in a finite timeline and deliver a, at least the metrics of success, was set out to set, let's say we want to create one little corner of the generative commons. And basically what we want is an experiment to see if three different sovereigns can come in and participate and share their information. So we only have to identify three of the hundreds or thousands that might be available and figure out a discreet, we're going to identify three, we're going to reach out to them, the measure of success will be the number of successful meetings, whatever we put in, to frame some little corner.  But I think that would help move us off the dime of endless discussion and debate about what we might want to become five years from now and into let's just start moving and see where it takes us. Totally agree. And Michael and Stacy, just in the process of getting a memorandum of understanding with Lion'sburg for OGM, we had a pretty big plan about what to achieve, what OGM would do over the next period. And then it just started unfolding into like what seemed to be recursive for infinitely unfolding project plans because there were so many different parts. And that just like, well, it exploded my brain for a while. And then we said, let's just cut this down and make it super simple and figure out how to get that done and that work. But that means that we have some old plans we can go reach into. And if we just start sort of digging at the coal seam, I don't know, I like that analogy better than I like, like swinging a dead cat or whatever else. Many ways to skin a cat, but still. Even for the OGM one that you're working on right now, Jerry, I think that we should step back for a day or two and develop some discrete measureables that are what we're gonna get done that you believe you can realistically get done. And I don't think the done is getting a certain amount of money. The done is building the tools and the outreach and the connections, having a calendar with an appointment every two days to talk to one person about it, having a process for getting feedback on the video and or developing additional short clip segments to modify it, whatever those would be that just shows discrete movement over a period of a few weeks. We could even say eight weeks because we're almost a month into OGM. So what are we gonna do in the next eight weeks, one week at a time? I like that. That would help kind of give us the milestones. And I think the milestones are really important. What we choose as measures, is what you measure is what you know is an old science thing. You get what you measure. Yeah, you get what you measure. And so if we can set discrete goals, I'm not saying it's gonna be easy to identify those goals but I don't think it should take more than let's say a one and a half hour call or a couple of 45 minute calls.  I agree. Okay. Well, I think a life, I guess. Indeed, indeed. Cool, so let's... I would be waving magic fingers if I was on camera, but I'm not. Excellent, thank you. Do you know whether Pete's gonna join us this morning? I do not know, have not heard. We'll check Mattermost right now to see if he said anything. Okay. I'm actually using my tablet this morning being lazy. So that means it's harder for me to check Mattermost simultaneously. I'm seeing no separate note from Pete, so I don't know. Let me just ping him. I like, just wanna pipe in that I like the idea that, as simple as OGM is funding projects for the commons and end of mission, almost. It's like that, I mean, obviously there's a lot of flesh to put on the bones of the projects and what they are, but if in fact, everything that OGM does is by necessity for the commons, it makes a lot of decisions, I think, for us. And gives people a reason to be here and to join us and to support what we're doing because it's regenerative. I also think it's really important that we make the funding definitions, not participation, but outputs. And so it's a discrete task. It's not like we're gonna have people join the commons, it's that by joining the commons, you must do the following thing. Or to join the commons, we want to demonstrate with each person who joins the ability to accomplish something in a short period of time if the goal is well-defined. Then we have, it's not just an intellectual exercise. I don't mean to minimize the intellectual exercise because it's big, but I think if we want to be persuasive to funders that we're worthy of funding, they need to see results. That's just the way funding tends to work. And I think that that's, the result could be the development of the PR statement, it could be the development of the process for onboarding people. I mean, there's a lot of ways we could juggle it, but I just think we need to move into task definition and then recruit people to do the tasks. And that means they'll get paid for the task, but there's no commitment that they're a fellow forever. They're getting people to do work. Right, that makes sense. So this is tangential, but on point actually, one of the people I was going to approach is Rick Clow, who is a Googler, Zuggler, and is all about OKRs. He became like the go-to guy at Google to get them all using OKRs, which I'm only vaguely familiar with. And OKRs are objectives and key results. So put a link in the chat, in the Mattermost chat. I found that when I was trying to teach another organization about smart objectives, because OKR was sort of simpler, but then they had enough trouble even understanding the concept that I didn't dive deeper into the OKRs. We finally got it done, but it was a very arduous process because none of the people in this nonprofit had ever really done measurable objectives. And they're in their career. Which alas makes sense, unfortunately. Well, that's why I wanna make sure that as we move toward a nonprofit status, that's not a problem for us. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, and the steward ownership structure we're moving toward uses a 501c3 and a C-corp in order to build something bigger and different. And I'm not a fan of the 501c3 or the C-corp. So paradoxically, ironically, whatever the right word is, heading sort of toward those structures because they're deeply understood and well-known in American business and world. And then harnessing those to higher purpose to feed the generative comments. That's the goal here. All right, I'll be quiet and eat my breakfast now. I've done my sort of been thinking about this need to talk about it thing. Excellent, excellent, that works well. So partly I think we need to figure out who is already in the OGM community likes OKRs or something like OKRs. And it can help us sort of plan our way around those kinds of things. Because I think that would be... It would be one of our strongest players. He's a great project planner. Yeah, and so here's a startup OKRs template that somebody wrote that I put in my brain and it looks kind of useful. So I'll put that in the Mattermost chat as well. Great, let's, there we go. Oops, I've got to turn this into a Mattermost link. So what I would suggest, Jerry, maybe as a starting point is not to try to think up whole new things, but let's make measurable objectives of the things that are kind of underway already, which would be for instance, the collaboration with Vincent. That's a specific example if we can do some little corner that is compatible with Trove that fits with the generative comments concept. And I'd like to suggest we stay focused in this call on the generative comments. But pick things that are already nascent ideas because then you don't have to sell the idea or anything else. But it just means, you know, we've been talking for three weeks about doing this. What's our schedule for the next eight weeks? Right, right. Put that down as the objective and it may slip a little or change a little or evolve. But at least we know what we're aiming toward. So what would you say are the things of that nature, you know, that have measurable outcomes that are underway? I know we have some stuff going with Trove. Well, I think once we get into that conversation, which is a conversation I'm eager to have, we're sort of off the generative comments conversation. Oh, okay. Although we could focus that question on the generative comments. We could say, hey, what kinds of things are sort of separable, parsable tasks, objectives that we can describe to create the generative comments. And that makes a lot of sense. Oh, I like that a lot. Well, I would, yeah. And I mean, I think it's fantastic to think about what is a project that Trove being a sovereign entity, which to my knowledge is not a non-profit though he's looking at, you know, co-op structures, but still for profit. You know, how does something like that generate something for the commons? And that, I mean, to me, that's a great case study. And maybe it even makes sense that the idea that a project that Trove might undertake be interoperable with massive Wiki and Factor and, you know, whatever else is out there is a kind of gating criteria for a project that they can work on under the sponsorship of OGC. Yeah. Totally agree. And that's the first place I would sort of start looking is what is the space between that leads to interoperability, basically, you know, interoperability and open data, open resources in the generative comments as a goal would be one of the first places to look. And also, I think there's no reason to say that in order to work on the generative comments, you must be a non-profit or anything like that. I think that fleshing out how any entity, whether a government or a C-corp or a B-corp or a what-corp or a Q-corp, oh, God, maybe there's Q-corp's now with Q and I. Just kidding. How could any of those entities, like, what does it mean for them to participate in the generative comments fairly? And with the implications being that whatever project is in front of them at the moment that the outputs of the project as much as possible enter the comments. And I think that there's privacy requirements around this and then there's sort of proprietary information that will factor into these conversations somehow. We need to figure out what's the appropriate way to manage that so that as much of it as possible makes its way into the comments.  When GNU first sort of became popular in pre-software and Richard Stallman was getting a lot of attention, the GNU license, basically there was a lot of talk about whether the GNU license, the GPL, the GNU public license was contagious. Meaning if you used GNU Unix or anything like that, GNU Linux or any other parts of it and accepted the GPL, were you then, was that contagious like ICE-9 to whatever other software you were doing? And that's turned out not to be a non-issue because that didn't happen that way. So, and this is like way beyond my pig read, but in our friend circle are people like Laurence Lessig and Corey Doctro and a bunch of other people who are black belts on these issues and who can sort of, we can consult with them and see how that should work. Go ahead, Michael. I'm curious to throw out the metaphor, fraught as it is. Oh, good. What a great start to a sentence, Michael. Go ahead. Go ahead. Of church, which we've used before. And when you think about a religious entity building a hospital for the common good, it's, there are private contractors involved in the building of that hospital that aren't just volunteers and the church is playing in the marketplace for the good of the commons. But the people who build the hospital are not gonna have any special rights to profit from the operation of the hospital. It's a fraught metaphor, but I think it's good for us to think about the idea that yes, we are these people who gather and talk and as Judy says, we don't wanna denigrate that. And there is something beautiful in church like about OGM, but we're also wanting to do projects for the common good. I actually think that doing the projects will be like a flower blossoming in terms of the good that can be done because it's not only delivering a result in the immediate, it's teaching a process of setting goals and objectives to accomplish outcomes. And as you grow into that, the measures and the specific objectives get broader and deeper and higher impact.  And so the important thing is to start people on the process, all of us on the process of really thinking about how we spend our time each day in terms of what goal it's moving us toward. And I don't, it's just a subtle change that it can be profound in terms of the focus of the energy. Absolutely. And Dr. Trich, for just a second, I think the more we float different metaphors and scenarios like, hey, this is sort of like a church in this way, the better we'll understand, we'll get a mutual understanding of what we're talking about here, what this is and how it works. I agree. So more of those, please. And I got stuck last week after this call, I started drafting in Google Docs an invite letter to invite more people to this call. And I kind of got stuck pretty quickly because I was like, I'll put a link to it, to the draft I've got in the Mattermost chat. And I got a couple paragraphs out that were fine. And then I was like, what, how does this work? Here we go, help us build. What if we set a goal for ourselves, because we have a week now before the next call and we're a third of the way through this call. What if we decide what we want to do as this group, limited though it'd be today and what we can pull into it in the next week to move us along. Maybe we could identify specific opportunity topics to explore for OKR approaches to the comments. Maybe there are, I don't know, five different zones or something of envision in the comments. I mean, part of it might be the process of membership. Another part might be the alignment of commitment to the comments. I don't know what they'd be, but I mean, just pick from the wisdom in this room and able to be discussed with others between now and next week. So that next week we could actually say, well, here are the framings of four different ideas for discrete activities that we would do for the next four weeks. It feels to me like one activity is I and whoever else who cares to need to get up on OKRs quickly. Because that's smelling like a really useful training. I'll commit to doing that, because I'm interested anyhow. Sweet. So let's pair up and go create it. Let's pair up, create a mini course on OKRs and then invite whoever else wants to come along for that journey. That sounds like a good to do item. And if early on, I can find the original article I sent this other group about OKRs. It may be included in your link as well, Jerry, but I think if we can at least get a nascent publication that's already out there by the people who are doing it, to those of us who work on it, we'll make faster progress on setting something up. That's a great suggestion. Okay, I just put that in the Generative Commons channel. Great. That you and I are going to draft a mini OKR course built from existing parts that are in the Commons and invite everyone along. So that we may use OKRs to guide OGM. And I think a probably a too large scale objective is to finish a Generative Commons agreement. I think that's one of the places we're aiming and I don't know what the bite size subtasks of that are. I think an earlier step is to figure out what is the table of contents of that agreement? Because I think we have a, and that's where I got stuck writing the draft letter, is that I have a general idea, but haven't done enough thinking and I need to do the co-thinking because I don't understand how it all works to get to a better flushed out understanding of what the parts are. And then one of my buddies when I mentioned we were working on this said, well, is this really a problem? And it was a good question. It was a very viable question. Nobody's asking for a Generative Commons agreement. It's spraying out of conversations we had, trying to look at old school intellectual property clauses and thinking, how might we rethink this so that when we think the old school intellectual property, what is the new school of Generative Commons? Like how, what? And so we're sort of pioneering and operating a little bit here. What if we didn't think so much about an agreement as identify in this early stage, key dimensions of specific objectives and how they align? Yes, and then the reason I say agreement is that it's a very concrete thing and it might be called a pledge, it might be called an umbrella, it might be called something else. But the reason I was heading toward the agreement concept is that it feels like, oh, okay, that's a page or several pages that someone could read and say, oh, check, check, check, I'm good on these, for example. And just a side story, but there's a really interesting book about Quakers, Money and Morals, something like that. And it talks about how the Quakers who were nonconformists, so were pushed out of all common occupations, invented a lot of stuff. So when you go look at the first sort of credit, like the granting of credit and stuff like that, it goes back to Quakers who lent each other money and there's plenty of other lending circles kind of through our cultures, but kind of the commercial credit that shows up in business, a lot of those were Quaker institutions, like Lloyd's Bank has Quaker roots. Audit, the idea of corporate audit comes out of Quakers who had open books for each other. So Price Waterhouse has Quaker roots and a bunch of these things were invented by outsiders because gentlemen didn't look at each other's books, you just sort of trusted blindly or I don't know the backstory behind like how this was an innovation in that day, but I imagine lots of dynamics were set in society at the time, they're just ran counter to building new institutions to try to create new forms of trust. So that all happened. And now we take for granted that, and there are laws that every company must have its books audited. Okay, awesome. So in the spirit of Commons, what are the ground rules, what is the agreement, what do we even call it is one of the questions here and how does it work? Please, Nessie. I don't know if this will make sense, but is there a way to build into the way the objective and goals are valued or measured that would catalyze those things that you wanna see happen regarding building of trust and things like that and the things that are normally left out of business type? I'm hoping so. I don't know enough about how OKRs and other forms of sort of objective mapping work, but my instinct is yes, my instinct is that that would lead us that way. Anybody else? That's a first step. I think if let's just say, there could be individual objectives and there could be I'm going to work with Michael to do this in the next three weeks. So if I and Michael keep track of how we come to agreement on doing that in the next three weeks, I mean, we in essence have created a trust bond because we're saying, I'm willing to work with you, I'm gonna trust you to hold up your end of the wood as we carry it across the field. And I think in a sense, that's how relationships build anyway. Most people don't jump in really big without discrete steps along the way with increasing complexity. And so I just think we're sort of taking a building block approach to all of the dimensions of this really big thing we're trying to do and starting with simple elements so we can build our confidence and our templates. And our practices. It's a great question, Stacy. And our habits. That we could include in the yet unspecified definition of what you put in a proposal for money, the mechanism of forming the group or the something of that order. Right. Good to see you, Michael. Thank you for working the inner tubes and the magics. You're muted on the new one. Yeah. Nice to be in the flesh. Yay. Yay, good to see you. That's right. This is the satisfaction of Zoom. It is a satisfaction of Zoom and I actually miss it when I can't see the people. Sure. And also it occurs to me that if we adopt some practices around something like OKRs that will be an easy way for anybody to come in and see what each organization is basically up to. You know, like here's the things we're aiming at right now. Here's the ones we finished before. You know, here's our Kanban board around OKRs or something like that. And I don't know how I assume OKRs dissolve into tasks that find their way onto Kanban boards, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the... What I remember of OKRs is basically I want to get to Abilene from Minnesota. To get to Abilene to Minnesota, there's a long traverse. So the key objectives along the way are to get to Kansas City, Missouri and then to get to Oklahoma City and then to get to Texas. And so... But they have to have timing on them. Right. So that you're delivering in sequence toward the objective. So that's... It's sort of like look where you want to be then back it down to what you can do in an interval of time then back that down into discrete things you can see right in front of you now knowing that the rest may change after you learn what you're doing right now. Which is very likely what Jordan is talking about when he talks about pool planning coming from his engineering and construction background. Yeah. Cool. And which leads me to ask myself, hey, has anybody written an open source OKR platform that has templates and tasks and things like that? That's certainly a query we can look into. I think there's a form. I think there's at least a template for drafting them. Well, I just pasted a Google Doc template into the Mattermost chat. So there's that but I didn't really look at it very deeply. It doesn't look like an empty template. It looks more like a description. But something like that would be great. That's a fine start. And then as we create ways of seeing ourselves if massive can create a table display of some sort and we can start feeding data in or if Factor would like to be the home of. And Michael, I'm dying to have that conversation about what you want Factor to look like and be like and its multifarious identities because maybe that's one of our tools for seeing ourselves. Our pillars, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're talking. Uh-oh. You're breaking up on us, Michael. I'm freezing that. Yep. Yeah. We'll take your interrupted voice over the beauty of it. Okay. Go ahead and start over. Yeah, I was just gonna say as you were talking, this isn't about Factor, but the idea that I'm actually sorry, Phyllis, in Europe is like just very practical, very practical things and planning things out and project managing is something he's very good at too. But that part of the project journey is the prep. And if you're going from, you know, you're going to Abilene and you map it out, there's also the navigation of, well, we need a car and we need this much money and we need, and who's coming and like, you know, how is everybody gonna pitch in? All that stuff before you even leave is critical and those are measurable and determining those measurables is part of the process. And you all know about the Abilene Paradox, right? I'll put a link in the chat. The Abilene Paradox, I haven't reread the entry and I'm just gonna remember it vaguely, but it's like, it's the weird situation in which there's a group of people who have no particular goal and somebody says, let's go to Abilene. And suddenly they all end up going to Abilene, but only because somebody in the room said, hey, let's go to Abilene. It's like the Abilene Paradox is that a group can be on something altogether that just has nothing to do with the group or unrelated to the group. And it's fairly non-substantive. Yes. In terms of distribution or output. Exactly. To Abilene and you can have a beer in a Texas pub. There's actually a book title, The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Managing. Okay. So let's avoid that. Michael, can you tell us a little bit more about factor? I've never actually gone to your website to look at how it works in terms of the framing that it might offer for this early stage of trial and test? Well, I may have to do a video. I'm going to do a video just hoping that it makes me sound better. And I don't want to sidetrack us on a big thing about factor because factor is basically, I wouldn't call it a project management tool, though it can be. It's basically a place to collect information for most any purpose and either work with it alone, work with it in groups and or share it with the public or any segment of the public. And to me, it seems like it's obviously a product that can be used in for-profit ways, but we're very much oriented toward the interoperable use of it with other platforms and for other purposes for the commons. And so, I mean, we could talk more about factor, but I think thinking about how, not so much in our process, but how entities like factor or Trove or anything can be employed to do things where the result is something that benefits the commons more than that it benefits the entity, seems like the thing that we want to do. That makes a lot of sense. And I do think that there's a lot it's been sort of an interesting dance that we're still kind of figuring out like how entities like KikoLab and Factor and Trove and Massive Wiki and others to be named later work together for the good of the commons. It's almost a good, whatever it is, a good project to hand some group of us that don't, that aren't one entity, there aren't one sovereign to say, okay, you're in charge of creating this for the commons. And part of that is that you'll all be able to use it interoperably, but that anybody will be able to use it interoperably. But this piece of information that I have, that I, Judy, have can exist on these platforms and be found on the other platforms. If I so choose, that's the way it works in the commons. And Judy, I recommend just going and signing up for a free account, just registering, because then you'll see the interface, it's really elegant. And Michael, when you describe it, like you describe it as being sort of like pin board or Pinterest or something else, like what are the closest neighbors for you? I think in terms of conceptual grasp, the easiest thing is Pinterest in that it's one of the few platforms that's out there that has, it's social and yet it has a single player mode. I mean, you can gather, you can work on factor. One of the bad things about showing factor to people is most of what goes on on factor goes on in private, whether it's one individual using it for themselves or a group of people using it, but not chilling it to the world. And so there's a lot more of that than there is on Pinterest. But ideally, we want people to be doing things on factor that they do wanna share. Initially, we were just thinking of the commons of factor, but in the commons in general, we want people to be producing stuff that then gets found and leads somebody to OGM, to Trove, to more enlightenment around what OKRs are. Maybe there's a OKR fan group on factor and they're producing something and they wanna share it with the world so people see things that way. So yeah, Pinterest cross with Dropbox is often the conceptual model we use because Dropbox, you can't really, it's something that you work with and you don't, it's important when we're talking about factor that we get across the idea that it's not a social network in the sense that we wanna keep you engaged. You're really happy with Dropbox and even willing to pay for Dropbox, even if you don't spend much time on Dropbox, you don't wanna spend time on Dropbox.  Pinterest is the visual side of that metaphor. And two thoughts along those lines. One is that because of my brain, I end up in a lot of conversations where I ask other people, where do you save stuff? And the most popular answer, I think, by a couple of yards is I have some private Pinterest boards that I use to just send myself to remember like what I saw, right? And that they use it as a memory aid and they may have one or several private ones, they may have several by topic or by part of their life. And then they have a public Pinterest that where they're busy doing what everybody else sees. And then second story, back in the days of Delicious, which is a social network for sharing bookmarks that I think many people regret no longer exists. A friend of mine was a digital historian and she said that for example, the tag C19, which means to historians 19th century, was this humming, humming online community for historians who gave a damn about the 19th century who were sharing resources and links and studies and whatnot. And I think that's a really ideal kind of dynamic to have. It's like, okay, I'm working over here, but the boundary between my private work and public is really easy to cross because I can make something public like by flipping a switch, no big deal. And then when I work in public, the benefits really multiply. So I'm urged by the dynamics of the platform to work more in public to create, and this is just to tie it back to the call we're on to create a generative comments, but I like that. So what other moving parts do we, Michael go ahead, it looks like you're about to jump in. Sorry, this is a video on, video off, Micah on thing is an interesting game.  Yeah, I was gonna say that I think, sorry, I'm gonna let you go ahead because I have to form the start a little better before I utter it. All right. And my question was gonna be to all of us and maybe just to ponder for next week, but so what are, how do we break the generative comments conversation quest project into sub projects that are bite size and tasty chewy and kind of fun.  Like these things are a big piece about community and having a good time doing what we're doing. And it's funny, there's a Venn diagram that I haven't written this post and I haven't seen anybody else write it, but I imagine if somebody has to have written it, but it's like learning, working and playing are three circles, which we separated.  The kids are learning and like it's work play and learning all is one big circle. The Venn diagram is all overlap. And what we've done weirdly in Western society is we've somehow like torn these things apart like here's school and even in school, that's recess and that's, that part's fun. This is serious and don't fidget.  I'm like, he was like a seven-year-old boy. I'm like, well, okay. He's supposed to master like sitting in place the whole time. That's like the big lesson we're gonna teach him now. And all of this goes to the hidden curriculum of schooling, of course. Anyway, so I'm interested in dissolving the generative commons project into some OKRs without actually knowing what I mean about either, actually about how OKRs work, which hopefully we will learn up on quickly, but also about like all the, you know, many-headed hydra possibilities of the generative commons notion. And there's something about generative commons, there's something about this like an intention or an ethos or a spirit. And I heard, this may be apocryphal, but I heard that in the days of vinyl records in Jamaica that when somebody made a reggae tune, the backside, the B side of their record would be the tune without lyrics because the biggest compliment in that community was to be quoted in somebody else's song. So they were making the lyric-free song available on purpose because their community was all about picking up and quoting somebody and, you know, basically borrowing, it was remix culture made like just baked into the culture, right? And so I don't know if that's actually true. That's just something stuck in my memory from back when. But, you know, and in hip-hop culture, I don't know how much of that carries and what happened because there was an intellectual property crisis when hip-hop got big, a huge crisis because it was all so much about sampling. And everybody who had pieces being sampled were like, you can't do that. And then you learn to listen to songs differently because you're like, oh, right, that is that vanilla ice riff like in the middle of this new song over here and so forth. There's no such thing as a vanilla ice riff. You mean a David Bowie Queen riff. See, there we go, there we go. There's a guiding lathe, I think, who's a brilliant author and he wrote a piece about intellectual property years ago. I think I can find it. And at the end of the piece, he says, I really didn't write this piece. This piece is composed of full large quotations from these other articles. And he had composed an extremely smart piece on intellectual property by borrowing and folding together and remixing like other people's thinking. And it was just genius. Love that. Yeah. Let me see if I can find it. The Venn diagram notion, I think is really relevant to factor for one, but just for information sharing in general, if you're a knowledge worker. Sorry. If you're trying to press the other one, yeah. Yeah. If you're a knowledge worker and you're, and this speaks to a target audience for factor, but if you're a knowledge worker, gathering information is what you do. Honestly, the first sentence of your pitch when I saw it, it's like, wait a second, has Jared been looking at factors, early pitches? Because when you find something that matters to you, what do you do with it is really our elevator pitch in a way. Yeah. And I hadn't used it in a while and forgot about it. And I thought, yeah, that sounds pretty compelling. But if you're a knowledge worker, player, learner, assembling knowledge is what you do even at play. And so just pulling your knowledge together, organizing it the way you do in your brain, the way we all do in some way, the way some people do on Pinterest is what we all do. And the sharing of it is part of the fun. And having ways to easily toggle, hey, other people should see this. Should everyone see this? Should this group and this group see this? Should only my family see this? Who should see this? And should they be able to edit it and contribute to it? Should they be able to read only? What's the permissions involved? That's the thing that we wanna make more universal, I think that really seems like a process that should be available in the comments to everybody without somebody having to profit from your eyeballs, being on it for a longer time so that people share stuff that's gonna get them more hits or likes. Which tickles down the dark rabbit holes. But it's important here to note that the default dynamic on the question you just raised is often, we lock the door and then we unlock it selectively for different sorts of people. And one of the magic bits that makes Wikipedia work is that the door is unlocked pretty much all the time. And it's only locked in desperate times when we've got to lock a page because things have gotten overheated, which happens. But they try to keep a few pages as possible kind of locked. Which is like, but that's the beginning ethos which is completely counterintuitive, right? So I have a whole riff on design from trust. And I wrote a piece basically that says like when people first hit systems that are designed from trust, they have this visceral reaction like this is impossible. There's no way this should be working or could be working. And so how do you build a system and a platform and a community that defaults to open when our instincts are so well trained, so well grooved to protect, to lock down, to lock the door, everything else, right? And so this is kind of a, this is a cultural thing. This is a how did you start the dance kind of thing? And then when people join in, they're like, well, I joined in and I do it this way because everybody else was doing it this way, which is great, which is great because social movements have like inertia and other people once they see that something is working in a good way, all the people will join. And I think that's how remix culture and hip hop shows up and takes off is that clearly it's a brilliant thing. There's a Madion tune. There's a French guy who uses the, I always forget the name of the device. Anyway, I'll put, for after the call, this is a video that's one of my favorites from long ago about remixes. And he says, this is a tune made up of my favorite 31 songs. And he's using one of these little keyboards where every button is programmable.  And it is so artful. It is just because he programmed all the buttons and he knows where the buttons are. And then he'll hit a macro button at the top and all the buttons change what they are. So now he has a new keyboard, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just a brilliant remix of 31 of my favorite songs. And he's invented what is a cool new song as well. Love these things. Just FYI, I put a bunch of OKR references in the Mattermost channel. Awesome. From, I found the email I sent somebody else and just copy and pasted. So there's three YouTube videos and three books. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I think I'm willing to bet that on YouTube there's a couple of simple tutorial videos that we can start with too. It's called the Novation Launchpad is the device. And it's from Ableton. The name that I couldn't remember is Ableton, which makes these devices that are just amazing. If I were 12, I would be learning how to use an Ableton. Okay. I just wanted to push on the Wikipedia analogy a little bit, just to say that the beauty of Wikipedia is not only what you see going on. Yes, it defaults to public. Obviously there isn't an apparatus which may be unfortunate on Wikipedia for people to, for the editors of a page to be before there is a page. What's going on in private is everybody is amassing the knowledge that allows them to write the public entry and they're doing that individually or and it would be nice if they were able to do that collaboratively and say, okay, here are these 31 things from other sources that we are going to draw upon to make this public entry together. And that apparatus, that structure is, we assume it, we know that they didn't just make this stuff up out of their heads. There are citations that are then shown in the piece and there are links at the bottom of the page to these 31 other things that form the information that made this public facing thing. So, you know, easing that ability, letting, I mean, this is the way I feel like the information commons wants to work with a Wikipedia is that when there isn't a Wikipedia entry, there should be the searchable place that's all tagged up by the historians who all put C19 on this stuff. And if you put C19 and architecture and, you know, New York and the street, you're gonna find how, what style this building is in and how it came to be and be able to write the Wikipedia entry about it. So, you just triggered a cascade of things that might be interesting. So first, I have long, long, long wondered why news organizations and learning organizations did not cut deals with Wikipedia to use Wikipedia and then improve Wikipedia as they were using it. Instead, we had schools that were saying, you're not allowed to even use or look at Wikipedia. Like that was the reaction. I'm like, no, no, no, no. A really fun thing here would be to help build Wikipedia. Kids would learn like crazy. It would be fantastic for kids everywhere. And at one point I was suggesting to a friend, hey, just give kid, go to Wikimedia, download the wiki and give your kids an empty wiki and tell them to fill it out for dinosaurs without copying pages from the Wikipedia. Like go, go, go build your own version of it or something like that. Cause the exercise of doing that collaboratively is its own learning, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then separately, having this all tagged up made me laugh because I borrowed, there's a very eerie documentary called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. So I paraphrased that and I said all tagged up by machines of loving grace. And then the last thing you were talking about about tagging up our environment. Oh, one other thing I'll say is that Wikipedia does have, one of the rules of Wikipedia for pages is no original content. And so people aren't editing new things for Wikipedia. They're documenting stuff that already existed and then creating pages for stuff, which is a little bit limiting in what you said, but it doesn't have to be because there could also be a boundary for other places where other things exist that are collaboratively created, which I think is what you're looking for. But the last thing is, Phelan Morelife, who's been in some of our calls, he and Mark Thibault are collaborating on a startup that uses augmented reality to try to mark up the world. And the kinds of things that they're marking up with could be coming out of factor toward people who are then in the world, instrumenting them and putting geocodes on them and whatever else. So there could be this ecosystem where the data, which winds up getting sort of location stamps and other kinds of things, winds up being loosely linked depending on somebody's point of view and a role I think they're calling path makers.  And the path might be, here's my favorite tour through Philadelphia. The path might be, I'm in a museum right now, but a bunch of items that are relevant to what I'm looking at here exist in other museums. So I'm gonna make a path across museums and let you hop and skip, I'm making this up. But I think there's a bunch of interesting stuff there. So I'll put a cryptic comment with all those little notes to myself in the chat. And I'll add that location-specific piece is really, really potent. And in fact, not currently visible on factor, but formerly so, was a location tagging. We used a third party service that went out of business, but location tagging for any item. So if you're looking, you can have a map view of a collection of facts and you can find things by location, which feeds into what I have to talk to Mark Antoine. But the idea that you should be able to be in a place and search by a topic that you're interested in, things that are around that place for knowledge rather than yelp for restaurants or whatever is, I think, really, really potent. That's awesome. Judy, thanks for those links in the Mattermost. I think that last one looks like a really good starting point for our mini course or something. And I will try to create a page in the OGM Wiki using obsidian for OKR training or something like that. We can sort of build together there. And if we were using factor, we'd be sharing these links through factor, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a recursive conversation in some interesting way. Ideally, we each do it in our platform of choice and can get to the same information, whatever platform we're on. And that's the kind of thing that OGM would support as a project for the commons where anybody who was building toward that would have to be doing it for the public good. And interoperability, to me, doesn't seem to quite cover that. As a descriptor, is there a better name for that? Because if we can nail that, if we can describe that act and what that means for the different tools and all that, then we're getting somewhere really close to the center of the issue, I think. Because interoperability is the default name for, hey, these tools are data interoperable or just functionally interoperable or something like that. And absolutely, those are goals I have in my mind for what OGM could not necessarily create by itself but catalyze, right? But if we can find better language for that, even a catchy phrase, that would be fabulous. Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, interoperability sounds kind of mechanical. It's very dry. It's very dry. Yeah. Hey, John. Oh, I thought things, there we go. Hey, John. We're just about to wrap the call, Alas. Yeah, I don't have a good word for it but the idea that really the lenses one puts on something, it's, yeah, I'll think about that.  And for anybody who hasn't heard it, leaf cutter ants can't beat leaves. So what are they doing? They're carrying the leaves into their nests where they were a subset of that particular genus and species of ant.  They're also known as farmer ants because they're farming this fungus. They feed the fungus. The fungus metabolizes the leaf matter and oozes a nectar that all of the ants eat. So unless they go about doing all these weird looking things and cutting down leaves and carrying, like I've been in a piece of jungle where there's a trail of ants walking across carrying leaves that are much larger than them. That's like really cool. And that's what they're doing. So, and by further analogy, I feel like one of the lone ants who's busy like mulching things up feeding a fungus, but I'm trying to figure out how can that fungus actually be shared much more broadly than just in this tiny little nest? Like how does that fungus become the healthy soil of the new commons? And maybe by the way, that might be a piece of our phrase. That might be, so we're busy because if you go back to food, the food systems and habitat and landscape, focusing on healthy soil solves a bunch of other things. And I don't know that this is an OKR way of looking at landscape management or farming, but soil organic matter is a good thing to measure. Soil fertility makes it absorb water better, makes it much more nutritious, makes it do a whole bunch of really great things happen out of it and leads to the recovery of landscapes and aquifers and so forth. So metaphorically, since soil is part of the old commons, like grazing commons for sheep, then if we're in the new commons and new commons are information commons, and I'm going back here to some language that I think Ostrom and her colleagues pioneered in Indiana and other places, then metaphorically shared, linked, open, reliable trustworthy, warm, contextual data is the new soil of the new commons. And if what we're doing is minding the soil together so that we can build more interesting, more generative things on top of it, that's really interesting. Does that fail for everybody or work okay? I mean, that's, I agree. I was just trying to think of something more tangible in terms of, I would just put this as an and, not a but, but when we think about how currency works and the degree to which whatever way you happen to be looking at value, whether you're looking at it in your pocket, in your bank account through one financial service through one transaction, the commonality is the currency that runs through all this stuff and you can pull all your currency from one place and put it in another place and you can have your currency privately, you can give it away. The bad thing is that it's very finite and it isn't generative in the same way that knowledge is, but you don't have it siloed and sort of owned by some other entity, it's always yours and it's always fluid. Now I guess fluidity is the thing in interoperability that's kind of what we want is information fluidity, which isn't a great phrase either, but. So David Baldwin talks, he did a lot of stuff on liquid democracy and fluidity, like it's in the air, yeah. Super interesting. So we should wrap our call where we've gone past our hour and just if anybody wants to make any closing comments for this call, this has been a super donor for me, thank you, which is so appropriate. I just want to come back to Judy's original proposal and just that notion of supporting projects for the commons as just being the essential nut of what OGM does and start coming up with even the little formative projects that can demonstrate that, I just love that. Me too, me too, thanks. Thanks everybody, this was awesome. We'll keep going, the lathering's repeat.


Here we go again, contour threads. Well, contour threads, very interesting. Just remember, these are threads that are absorbable. So they only last for a while, for a short period, and the body dissolves them. Now what happens is that when these threads are put inside your skin, you have a reaction to it, and that causes a little inflammation, so it acts upon your body to turn on the collagen system. So it does help a bit, but just remember, it's short-term, the threads are absorbable, there's always side effects with putting things in when you can't see where you're going. So be careful, but it works.


Hey, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the session. Let's begin this time with a word of prayer, then we will get into our class. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much once again for giving us this wonderful opportunity to come together and study and learn and pray God that even as we gain insights on church planting and the call that you have for us, I pray that Lord, you will fan into flame, passion and desire to know you more, to walk in your will of God. Lord, we just surrender ourselves. Lord, each one of us, everything that we study and learn, Lord, let it be good seed on good ground, bearing fruit in our lives. We just come at this time into your hands. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. All right. So before we go ahead, let me just do a quick review of what we did yesterday. So yesterday we looked at quite a few points and Chapter 22 recognizing your call as a pioneer. And, you know, we established the fact that the call of God is very important for our lives. And then the big question was whether we are called to be a pioneer or whether we are called to serve under another ministry. But we looked at certain indicators of grace, meaning the grace of being a pioneer. A pioneering spirit is somebody who has the ability to do something new, always being adventurous, ability to build bridges, to work independently, being a visionary, so to see things in the future, a stirring in the heart to, you know, to plant, to start something new, a clear confirmation and direction from God's word. And there are times when we accidentally find ourselves being a church planter. We looked at wrong reasons also when it comes to church planting, not to be motivated or strive for competition. And many a times we try to get into ministry or church planting just because the other options didn't work out. Looking at it as a job, right? Okay, this is my job, so I'm going to do it. Now, we got to get out of that mindset. This is not a job. Ministry, you may be a paid staff. We may be working in under some ministry, but it's not a job. You are serving the Lord. You have to do, we can't say, okay, this is what I'm going to do. This is my responsibility. So this is the only thing that I'm going to do. No, you've got to step out. You've got to, you know, give you 110%, not just 100%, right? It's, you know, when you look at the corporate, they give you 100% or 90%, 100%, but it's just not so in the kingdom of God and ministry. You just got to go above and beyond, right? There are things that you have to do. And even if it's not something that we are comfortable doing, there are times we God will ask us to step out and do it, right? So it's not just a job, but you're serving the Lord. And another wrong reason to do, to engage in church planting is for personal reasons. You know, I don't like the city. I prefer to move to another city. And these are wrong reasons, right? Or I don't like the sculpture. I don't like the language, or I prefer to do something else in another place. So again, we need to have the right direction from God when it comes to church planting. Then we looked at whether to pioneer within an existing ministry or to do things independently. So we looked at advantages, right? So the advantages are more when you're looking to pioneer within a ministry, right? You have a well-established strategy. You have methods. You have people. You have like-minded people. You have resources within the organization. You have, you know, as an organization or as a church, you may be already been in the church or been in the city for about eight or 10 years. So you've gained recognition. People have seen the fruit of your labor. So starting new ministries within a church is always good. And also when it comes to transitions and handovers, you've always got people within the church plant that we can handover and train and build up people, right? But there are also areas that we need to be cautioned when it comes to working under a ministry or starting a, meaning when it comes to pioneering within a church, right? Pioneering a church plant within an already established church. We saw that number one should be that you should be spiritually and, you know, aligned with the vision of the church, right? Remember the example that I gave you yesterday, right? If you are example this person in a Pentecostal church and he wants to start a church plant in that same church. And if he says, you know, I don't really believe in the gifts of the spirit, it does not make sense for him to do that because Pentecostal church, we know they emphasize on the gifts of the spirit and even a charismatic church, right? So be aligned to the vision, be aligned to the culture of the ministry. And thirdly, is there freedom for the release of gifts and, you know, the release of the gifts of the Holy Spirit flowing in the gifts of the spirit? Is there freedom? Do you have the liberty to minister freely, right? So these are certain aspects that we must think about. And does the ministry itself have a heart for this? So for example, there's somebody already working in the church. He wants to start a church in another city or another state. To ensure that, okay, does the church have, you know, a heart for this place? And do they, is there a long-term commitment from them that I can see? And does the church have well-defined systems in place to provide support and assistance? And I also shared that, you know, we have a lot of church plants in India, in different places in India. And what we do is we do encourage them. We are always there for them. We have missions where we go and as teams we go. We minister, we help build churches. So we can say that, you know, even through these church plants within already an existing church, it's good for the leader or the pioneer to be involved in at least a certain amount of involvement with the pioneer is always good, right? Because they feel loved. It could be different cities, different states. But when they're attached to the, or they're in touch with the pioneer and in touch with the mother church, so to speak, what happens is there's this greater sense of confidence, greater sense of reliability. There's a feeling of, hey, I'm not just, you know, a small church, but I belong to a bigger church community. And that really encourages us. So whether any one of us are planning to start independently or just planning to start a church plant within an already established church, we need to keep certain things in mind. Get to clear direction. And I also mentioned that, you know, especially if you're planting a new church or a new ministry within an established church, make sure that you discuss with the pastor. Be open, be free. Discuss all the points that you'd like to, you know, discuss. Be an open book, share your thoughts, share. Ask the pioneer, the senior pastor to share. What is their expectations? If you share your expectations that way, you know, everyone are on the same page, right? So we stopped here in Chapter 22. Let's get into Chapter 23. In the initial portion of this course, we look at a few personal preparations that are involved when it comes to church planting, but let's look at a few more in Chapter 23. Church planting is not for the faint hearted, because I love what Jesus said. When you put your hand to the plow, finish the work, right? You must be committed. If it is hard work, it is dedication. It is going back to God. It is receiving guidance from God. You know, I was just saying this in the other post earlier this morning. There is a cost to the anointing of God upon our life. There is a cost for... When God calls us to be a pioneer, there is a cost. We can never compare ourselves with others and say, He is not praying for three hours, so why should I do it? No, the call of God is different. You must be committed. When it comes to church planting, it is basically going into a heritory where the devil has his presence and you are establishing the presence of God there. It is not for the faint hearted. It is not for people who will easily give up. No, not at all. You and I have to depend on the power of the Holy Spirit. We have to depend on God when it comes to personal preparation and pioneering a church. Let's look at these points. Number one point. Be spiritually strong. Maintain a consistent, constant personal spiritual life. Sometimes church takes priority. You have to step back and say, No, I am going to maintain my relationship with God and out of that should flow everything else. Out of that should flow the whole aspect of pioneering and building. Being spiritually strong is basically building a good foundation. If you look at a pioneer and if the person is not spiritually strong, I said this yesterday, but I am going to say this again. We can start a church. People also will come. No problem. People will come. But are we able to build them up? Ephesians 5, Paul writes about the 5-fold ministry and he says all of this is there for the building and for the equipping of the church. We need to be as leaders, as senior pastors of the church. We need to maintain a strong personal commitment, a strong relationship with the Lord. You have to get equipped. You have to read, you have to learn, you have to spend time in God's presence.  We can never come to a place saying, Okay, I have done it. I have studied as much as I can. I am satisfied now. We are a student of God's word every single day. We get up in the morning. We pray. We surrender ourselves. We surrender our lives. We surrender the ministry. We just put everything and say, God, it's all about you. And we must equip ourselves. We must be prepared. Picture this pastor. You are going to preach every Sunday. Eventually, you are going to have Bible studies. Eventually, you are going to have youth meetings, teen meetings, men's meetings, women's meetings. And you have got to know content. You have got to have good material to teach them. Nobody is going to listen to the same thing again and again. Meaning, even if it is repeated, it has got to be anointed of God. Be clear with your calling and vision. Because you, as a pioneer, are the vision bearer. You hold the team together. You hold the vision. And you are the vision caster for the ministry. So be clear of your calling. Be clear of the vision. Look at Jesus, Matthew 6, 22, 23. Shall we read that? Matthew 6, 22 and 23. Yes, can one of us please read that? Matthew 6, 22 and 23. Matthew 6, 22 and 23. The eye is the lamp of the body.   Yeah, thank you. So, Matthew 6, 23. The Lord Jesus is just putting out a statement. And he's saying, this is what it is. Let me get there. The eye is the lamp of your body.   You know, when in other places, even the Lord Jesus says, I've come for one task. One is to do the will of the Father. And what was the will of the Father? That was, you know, we know that He came into this world to die on the cross. He knew His calling. The Lord Jesus knew it. He knew the vision. He knew the purpose for what He has been sent for. And He was the vision bearer. Can you picture this? Jesus took 12 people. And almost all of them were not very valid testimonies in society. When He used them, those 12, to turn the world upside down, they went to different parts of the world and preached the gospel. That even today, we're talking about the Lord Jesus and His disciples. Be clear of your calling. Be clear of your vision. What God has for you. Now, over time, the way you fulfill the vision can vary. It changes. Methods can vary. Practices may vary. Conferences and events may change and vary. But the vision is always constant. It's always constant. The Lord Jesus' vision was to do with the will of the Father. And how He went about doing it. He did miracles. He did science. He did wonders. It was very different. But the vision was to do the will. So, you and I, as a pioneer, get that calling. Get that vision right. I get to speak to quite a few pastors and leaders. Recently, I spoke to a pastor who was leading a church in North India. Just from the rural areas of North India. But it's a good developing area. Good church. The church is growing. Sharing a few thoughts with me. He was asking about how we can... They're still looking at options of doing things online as well. Media. Trying to get those things involved. And I asked him. It's about 8 or 9 years that his church has been functioning. He's got about 100-150 people in his church. It was good. He said, I don't know what is the vision. I just want to share the gospel and bring people to Christ. I was able to just care with him. It's important to have a vision. Have a mission and a vision. And have values within the church. Because now that you're 150 as the church grows, it becomes 500. Or even 1000. What's going to happen is you need to have a vision. You need to be a vision caster. Why are we meeting on Sundays? What do we want to achieve as a church? What is the vision that God has given us as a church? How can I involve in that vision? So he began to understand there's so much that is it's not just about starting a church. But we thank God that God is definitely using him. But there are times when we have to go back to the minors. Meaning go back to the beginning. Sort things out there and then do what we have to do. Look at this. Be willing to work twice as hard as others. This is the most difficult part. Everyone wants to be pioneers. But doing the work is sometimes the challenge. First Corinthians chapter 15 and verse 10. First Corinthians 15 and verse 10. That's what it says. But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace to me was not without effect. No. And I worked harder than all of them yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Paul is saying, look for what I'm doing for what I have achieved up to now, I worked harder than everyone. Now it sounds like boasting but it's a fact. There's a great preacher said, when the apostle Paul started off he was about 50 years old. 33 when he had the Damascus approximately 33 when he had the Damascus experience 17, 14 years, 3 years in the desert, 14 years of waiting almost about 50 years. This 50 year old man started his first missionary journey and there's a saying that he alone did what all the 12 disciples did together. He worked the hardest he traveled the most, he was shipwrecked beaten, he went through constant persecution but he's saying all of this have been able to do the most of the grace of God. So wonderful, he ends that by saying, yet not I but the grace of God that was with me. As a pioneer, remember you and I must work twice as harder. Right, if God wants to use us we got to work twice as harder than others. Now the mistake we make sometimes is again we share our spiritual life with others and we're not to do that. You can never say, hey my friend is praying one hour a day and why should I pray two hours or why should I my friend he doesn't go to church every Sunday he goes at least once in two weeks or he goes two weeks in a month why is it that I have to go every Sunday and I'm going and serving there no, we got to work twice as harder and that's how God has designed it. We got to spend time in His presence. Now this working hard could be both physical and also it could be a lot of sacrifice sacrifice of sleep sacrificing friends food, there are times you have to fast and pray like everyone are eating and enjoying and we may think to ourselves why is it that I am the only one struggling that's because you are the pioneer if God is called you and me we got to go through it greater the call greater the responsibilities can you look at this in the in the Old Testament everyone were having fun, why does Elijah have to go through all of this trouble sitting in the mountains with Jeremiah everyone were fine everyone were enjoying they were looking at Jeremiah they were laughing at him saying why are you going through all of this Jeremiah said no I got to do it I am the prophet for this nation I got to work I got to sacrifice for the people right so you and I it's a call we can't escape it now what happens if God has called us as a visionary or a pioneer and we don't work hard what's going to happen we are going to see stagnancy meaning we are going to be in that same place now church especially when it comes to a local church the success or the fruit of a local church is not always numbers it's not numbers always it's also about how many how many leaders you are raising up how you are building up people from being babies in Christ to being mature in Christ right just remember this you know when I just share this when I was in Bible college and I really wanted to do something right so we were those who are here in person would know it but we had this whole timetable 5 am in the morning we wake up pray get ready then come to your classes by 8, 8.30 and all that I just knew that I wanted to do something more so I kept asking God what should I do remember God ministering to me and saying I want you to wake up earlier than everyone else this is very hard for me right because it's not something you know I used to stay with the boys for for almost the entire time I was studying and I wanted to wake up early so it was very hard I said God everyone are sleeping everyone are you know just resting and why should I wake up I had this question many many many times why should I wake up they are the ones who should be getting up and studying and they are the ones who should be doing I do well in my exams I've done well in all my tests I kept saying why me I don't want to get up I realized that if it's I read this book where forget the author he says why not me why not me ask is when the question comes why me say why not me so I said okay God I'm going to change things in my life I remember the just waking up at early in the morning 4 am and I would spend time in God's presence and then 5 am everyone would get up and initially I was so upset you know after the prayer also now these guys are getting up I woke up much before them but over time I began to enjoy being in God's presence that there came a time that for the entire time when I was in Bible college every single day I would wake up at 3 am because I wanted that 2 hours extra in God's presence was it easy? definitely not easy but I knew there's a call of God in my life and if I want the anointing of God and if I want God to speak to me I cannot be comparing myself with others I cannot be comparing myself with what others are doing they may be right they may be wrong it doesn't matter but God this is what I want to do I thank God that that habit has stuck on it's normal for me by the time I come for the first class 6 hours that I am normally awake I enjoy it it's not a burden it's not like oh man I am getting up 3 others are all enjoying no because we are enjoying it enjoying being in God's presence and you know that God is spilling you and it's not about working hard but it's about God's anointing just doing things in our life and as a pioneer these are steps we have to take we have to be able to you know go that extra mile 5 pray, plan, prepare don't be hasty Proverbs 21, 5 would anyone like to read that please Proverbs 21 verse 5 the plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty the plans the diligent lead to profit so pray plan, prepare and remember we I talked about this as a church you know we have administration we looked at the different stages administration so we have different themes that are involved and so right now what we do I think I've already said this but if there's a conference that's happening we already have the 2024 calendar out right every event for the entire year is already working on it it should be out anytime soon and if there is a conference we work 6 months in advance for one conference 6 months in advance right so first we confirm the date then we send in save the date e-mailer to the entire church so for example the conference all the men of the church get a save the date e-mailer then they get a then we go to 3 weeks of announcements so it goes on the video announcements on Sundays then they get an sms and then the e-mailer is sent with the link for registrations registration link is sent that the sms is sent with the registration link the reminder is sent and then the entire process as this is happening on the other side you have the teams that are involved in admin side booking the venue whoever is teaching there are teachers or preachers who are facilitating the conference maybe some of them coming from auto station within Bangalore so there's so much that happens 6 months in advance and then after that we have follow up after each conference like that so great plan and prepare don't be hasty don't just make decisions because haste can end up in destruction or haste can end up in a loss be emotionally strong very very important you'll have people coming and sharing your thoughts you as a person, as a pioneer remember you're just a person you're a human being you will go through ups and downs in life you will go through emotions you'll sometimes feel up sometimes feel low you've got to be able to maintain and be emotionally strong that's where being in God's presence really helps us in all of this 7, get things ordered in your personal life don't let personal weaknesses become an entry point for satans disruptive attempts get things ordered in your life in your personal life now for example speaking to this happened many years ago speaking to this pastor and he opened up to me and we were just talking and he shared that he, this pastor was, as he was sharing, he said that I have one weakness and that weakness is every month at least once or twice I watched pornography I was taken aback he's a good pastor right not in this city not different city, good pastor loves the Lord wonderful ministry churches growing good leaders good family but he said this every month if not once or twice I watch pornography what do I do so I said first thing I said is close the door for the devil get things right if you have to take a break from ministry because sometimes we feel that if we are not there the ministry is not going to happen which is not true even if we take a break there are people who can come in and do things never feel that without me nothing is going to happen nobody is irreplaceable every person in this world can be replaced that's a hard fact but it's true get things in order in your life don't let these weaknesses become a door for the devil right don't let the enemy to come in he's like a roaring lion he will look for an open door he will look for an open opportunity our responsibility is to close those doors I'm not saying that we walk a perfect life we do make mistakes we do get temptations we do have things in our life that we need to change but if we keep pushing that sin under the carpet it's going to remain there you know the saying like an elephant in the room it's going to remain there but we got to get rid of it we got to get rid of it close the door so it doesn't happen again and God has given us his Holy Spirit God has given us scriptures that we can declare we can proclaim, we can overcome he's given us the weapons he's given us the armor of God he's saying we overcome the enemy by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony we use all of this now even though even though you and I may have the vision sometimes or very often it is your family that is doing the church planting why? because now this is in certain cases not always but in certain cases we have the vision but others are doing most of the work no, get things right in your life and I've heard of many many stories well-meaning anointed pastors who have just fallen because they thought they are irreplaceable or nothing is going to happen to me no, the enemy is out to get us but God has given us the strength God has given us his weapons so get things right in our personal life don't be ashamed if you have to get counsel if you want to get help go ahead there is nothing wrong never feel that hey I am a pastor how can I go to another person and ask for help never feel that be open develop your ability to draw strength motivation and discipline from God strength we need physical strength mental strength when it comes to church and church ministry we need mental strength you got to be strong to motivation something you are doing ministry for a person that you can't see where is the Holy Spirit where is Jesus and sometimes we may feel or get monotonous doing the same old thing again imagine five years you are just waking up every morning and praying same thing same prayer thank you Jesus bless these people same thing it can get monotonous definitely yes imagine you are leading worship for the past 10 years it can get monotonous it's natural but you got to get motivated by God say God even though I have been doing this for 5 years or 10 years now but Lord when you come you will make the difference and you bring get motivation then there is discipline as a child of God we must have discipline a church a pioneer in the ministry a leader must be disciplined we cannot be without discipline and just do things we got to make sure that we walk in a disciplined way have a disciplined lifestyle these are the things I am going to do so whatever works for you you can just chalk out your days plan what you plan this is how I am going to do it I am going to try my best to stick by these timings be disciplined in life never compromise on your time on the word of God and prayer when it comes to church ministry activities be disciplined there are things that has to go emails that you have to do people that you have to call get it done procrastination is not a good sign of a leader be disciplined be motivated from within inside of you learn to relate with people well we talked about this last class a pioneer must be able to build bridges among people and the apostle Paul did that beautifully he said to the Jews I will be a Jew to the Gentiles I will be a Gentile when he went to Athens and when he went to Corinth he was able to build bridges he went to Crete he was able to build bridges when he was in Ephesus and the churches in Galatia he was able to understand and relate to them and we must be able to do that we need to love and care for them genuinely the problem is what we must not do is look at people as projects and okay these are the project project one to five did they do get done did they come did they do the work no they are people relate to people learn how to manage relationships where to draw the line the ability to say no this is something that took me a long time to learn because I always thought okay it's coming from the corporate sector working in the corporate for quite a few years and then I came and joined Bible everyone loved each other everyone cared for each other it looks very nice initially I was like wow this is how heaven is supposed to be everyone is so good to each other loving each other I was in a rude awakening when people started saying no and people started there were times when there were assignments given it's thought to get done but I really enjoyed those times at a very young age I got into this pastoral team and I went through a very tough time because I didn't know how to say no even though I didn't like it I would say okay as you wish I could not say no because these people are they are better than me they know more than me but then I thank God that over time I began to understand that as a leader I must be able to say no and of course we do it lovingly we correct also lovingly but we must develop the ability to say no we cannot agree to everything what people say right without feeling guilty right for example there were times when this happened many years ago not in ABC there was this one time these pastors had invited me to come and at a conference this conference was supposed to happen in Indore and so it was summer during Christmas and I was working in the corporate sector at that time and summer during Christmas and he said can you come and I really wanted to go but I also didn't want to go because it was Christmas time I wanted to be in my hometown with my family but then I I said no guilty because the pastor said to me see you don't have a wife, you don't have children why can't you come why can't you come whether it's Christmas or Christmas it's about Jesus only you can come so when I entered the call I felt sort of feeling guilty I said no to God's work and I remember calling him back and saying okay I will try to come and then eventually I had to ask the Lord to remove that guilt and I could confidently say no I can't come but again this this comes over time right God will give us the strength, God will give us the wisdom I went to say no, how to say no so being in God's presence helps develop required skills okay time management very important money management extremely important communication how to communicate with people ministry is about people you're talking to people you can say if there are three sentences you have to say it in three sentences you don't have to say it in six then by the time we say it in six sentences the other person will be wondering what is he saying just practically clear, concise communication right and then again in a time that we are living in now we do need technical skills, we got to learn we got to adapt to what is happening around us right so we be able to develop these skills time management is something that as pioneers because we be very busy people will come people want to meet you you would have to go to visit people different areas in the ministry that you will have to oversee and so one of the things that you can do is something that really helped me is so I what I do is I different ministries that right now that I'm handling what I do is I just you know I break them down these are the number of hours I'm going to spend in this week or the church the second area life groups these are the number of hours I'm going to spend the third area men's ministry these are the number of hours bible college these are the number of hours worship, practice, worship team all those things these are the number of hours so these five different area these are the hours per week is what I'm going to spend so I'm managing trying to manage it's not like I've mastered this art I've mastered learning but it has helped me than randomly just looking at different things then develop sensitivity to identify opportunities for kingdom work learn to respond quickly be proactive, be responsive right so as a pioneer there will be opportunities for kingdom work not only in your city but other cities and you learn to respond be proactive if you're in a place to go minister you see that you carefully consider this as a door that God is opening go ahead step into it be proactive and be responsive establish good mentoring relationships for yourself so as a pioneer this is something that we may lack or not only pioneer but others as well pastors we may not have good mentoring relationships and this is something that we must develop we must have either other pastors other senior leaders seniors in ministry to speak into our life to give us some guidance now it's not like we have to listen to whatever they say but just being there to mentor to help us this will especially encourage us, exhort us as pastors and leaders and finally stay aligned and accountable to your church right if you're sent from an existing church stay aligned, be accountable if you're a pioneer still you stay aligned and be accountable to your church members be accountable to your staff and the people who are working with you be accountable to your volunteers just being accountable gives you a sense that okay we're all in it together it's not like the pastors here and we are doing all the stuff right we're all accountable to each other so we'll stop here and we'll pick up from the next class so we we have chapter 24 making the journey and we see chapter 25, 26 and 27 just a few pointers that we will we can probably discuss and then the appendix is for major cities in India so with chapter 27 we will be completing our course so we probably need another two or three sessions more and then after that we can I'll post the assessments on the classroom and then we'll be done with this topic and we'll also take a session to just do a quick review of everything that we did for the entire course right so thank you so much everyone for joining this class have a good day, good week ahead I'll see you soon, bye


We just hung up with our weekly training call that we do with hundreds of agents all over the country every single Wednesday In that call today, we talked about focused today. We talked about distractions today We talked about how when life happens What do we do?   There's ways to think outside the box To make sure that it doesn't affect your week as an agent weekly consistency equals insurance success if You're not consistent with what you're doing or if you let distractions Just skew your focus and you're all over the place before you know it It will jack up your whole day and your whole week and you wouldn't have been what? consistent or successful because you weren't consistent Everyone's got a mission everyone's got a goal the way I stay focused is I have a good goals I have a mission When I'm on purpose when I know my why when I'm on mission when I know what's going on when I know what? I want to accomplish and I don't let anything distract me from accomplishing that Whether it's a specific thing for a day. Maybe it's specific specific thing for a week.  It's like find don't let excuses keep you from working Stay on goal stay on mission and stay Consistent because what you can control is how you respond. So when life happens when distractions happen when crazy things are going on all around you How will you respond?


I'm the co-founder and CEO of Oizong. I'm from India. We all know pollution is the big challenge in front of us, and we need to do something about it. The way Paris Agreement has been perceived by the global leaders is really, really disappointing. Climate change is real. In fact, air quality and pollution is the fifth largest killer. The bad part is, some innocent people are facing the consequences of this issue. I have seen a live example in my family. My mother got detected with second stage of lymphoma cancer in 2010. After series of radiations and chemotherapy, she is fine now. But I used to always think of the possible reason. She never smoke, she never drink. Being a housewife, she was hardly under solar radiation. She had no family in history of cancer. Then how come? How come she got this disease? But later on, I realized that the only source of human body contamination is either air or water or food. There is a saying in India, you become what you eat, you become what you drink, you become what you breathe. You do have good control on what you eat and what you drink. But what about the air you breathe? You do not have any control. And that's where we are working on. We are making the invisible part of the environment visible. We all know there is no medication possible without correct diagnosis. Data is the key to understand any complex problem. So that's why we started gathering available data back in 2015 when we started working on OISO. But later we realized there is very few data available. In such a big country, India, we have just 57 locations from where the environmental data is monitored. And the real bottleneck was the existing solution. The present environmental monitoring station costs roughly 200 to 3,000, 300,000 US dollars per location. It occupies around 200 square feet of land and consumes 3,000 to 5,000 watt of electricity. Do you think this is a sustainable and scalable solution? Not at all. And that's why we decided to work on a smart, sustainable and cost effective solution for a highly scalable application and nationwide deployments. This is the result of two years of R&D, Polydron. Polydron is a 360 degree environmental monitoring solution designed to acquire various environmental parameters on a single platform. This works on a patent pending technology. Polydron is capable to monitor air quality, radiation, traffic data, weather information, and a lot more. The data generated by the Polydron is acquired on a single platform called OISO Terminal. OISO Terminal is available in the form of a web platform as well as a mobile app. Now let's compare our solution with the existing one. The solution we have is 98% cost effective. It does not occupy any space. It does not consume any energy. It has 95% less of operational maintenance cost with 92% of data accuracy. With such a revolutionary technology, we have 100 plus installations in India using which we are monitoring 2.5 million life qualities. We have more than 50,000 users of our app who are checking the environmental data on a daily basis. We have four projects completed in India and three in the pipeline. We have participated in 15 plus smart city projects across India with India's biggest system integrators. This is our second financial year. We have six paying customers and 175,000 worth of revenue as of now. With the current pipeline, we will close this financial year with half a million dollars of revenue. By this pattern, we will be a 20 million dollar revenue company in 2020. We are working in smart city projects with system integrators like Wipro, Honeywell, Starlight, Tata Consentancy, Quest Corp, etc. Our solution has been deeply integrated with the ecosystem of Cisco, IBM, Intel, Wipro and some more. We have participated in global platforms. We are the winner of IBM SmartCamp, French Tech Ticket, Sparklabs IoT and Swissnex. All this would not have been possible without a great team. We are a team of 15 and we are growing. I started OISOM back in November 2015 with my co-founder Sohil and Proshank. We have a good parallel of advisors and mentors from the leading organization of the world. Now let me show you the magical number 50, the power of magical number 50. The solution we have is 50 times cost effective, compact and sustainable. So now we have opportunity to scale up this solution by 50 times. And this 50 times scaled up solution will give us 50 times more data, 50 times more information and 50 times more knowledge. Now just imagine this 50 times more knowledge will lead us to have better healthcare, better governance, better policies, better real estate, planning, environmental solutions, transportation, industrial growth and a lot more. Let me give you a glimpse of what we are envisioning. Using such valuable data, we are trying to discover hidden patterns in the environment. By applying deep learning algorithms, it will emerge as the future of environment, presenting also environmental AI. This AI will take urbanization, industrialization and nature as the input data and give you a lot more information and predictions about healthcare, governance and climate. This is how AI will have a complete ecosystem for an understandable and predictable environment. Thank you.