Thanks to a connection from my friend Sheri Herndon, I was able to work as a freelance cameraman for the day with Odyssey Networks, a video production company out of New York City that’s the largest interfaith media company in America. They are actively developing a mobile phone application that will share videos about compassion, interfaith dialogue, religion, spirituality, meditation, prayer and much more. Their goal is that people will be able to enjoy short videos of world thought leaders as they ride buses, wait on line at the supermarket, or wherever they may be.

Over the course of the day, as speakers came off stage, we filmed interviews in various parts of The Center for Spiritual Living campus.  Interviews included the self described Interfaith Amigos – a rabbi, imam and priest who travel the country together promoting interfaith dialogue and understanding, with Richard Conlin, the Seattle City Council president on hand to sign the charter, James O’Dea (the former Executive Director of Amnesty International), the boy who stood next to Barack Obama as he signed the Health Care Reform Bill (a Seattleite from the Rainier Valley!), Karen Armstrong, Courtney Martin (The Secret Society of Creative Philanthropy), and various reverends, authors, and activists.

They each talked about their understanding of the concept of compassion, their motivations and experiences with conflict and therapy and peace and love and community.  Very positive stuff.  What I particularly appreciated was the spectrum of experience, and the way in which each of them talked about the work they did, in terms of where they saw change coming from, and the greatest obstacles to worldwide policy initiation toward greater compassion.

It was a great day. Made me proud to be a Seattleite.  All of Odyssey Network’s content is open source so stay tuned, I’ll be posting as many of the interviews as possible as they become available.

Some of my favorite parts included:

An analysis of how much is to much? in reference to the saturation of information.  One of the metaphors that Greg Bear, a science fiction writer who gave the talk used was the bee community metaphor of bees going out into the field on their own and doing their thing,  then coming back to the hive to share, but how in the current mediasphere there is too much resorting to only doing the sharing, and that there’s less and less of the going out into the world part. Today people are posting every breath they take and thought they have.  As a science fiction writer much of his analysis had a hyperbolic techno society vision vibe in which basically the inside of your eyelids if not just the inside of your eyeglasses will eventually be screens, but I appreciated the general comparison.

The ‘Everyone Needs a Safe Place to Save‘ talk was also very impressive, about the lack of access to banking in the poorer parts of the world.  The Gates Foundation is working to harness the power of mobile phones globally, since even many poor people have phones,and their problem is nowhere to put their money, if not in animals, hidden, loaned out, or elsewhere, and that if a mechanism existed for depositing and saving even cents daily, that that savings would lead to actual wealth accrual.  So now people can walk into a rural market or business, give their money to the business, and the business immediately uses the phone #, acct # and pin to deposit the money in their acct and the store takes a small percentage.  Apparently over 40 million mobile phone users have begun using the technology in Kenya only 3 years into the technology existing there. Very cool. There were actually 2 talks about the power of cell phones. The other was with David Edelstein and Fiona Lee, and they argued the mobile phone as a great playing field leveler and tool of overcoming information poverty, as the cell phone transforms as something you use with your ear to something you use equally with your eyes, with applications in health, agriculture, and beyond as online information becomes available to folks based on very elementary search terms.

In Sapna Cheryan’s talk about ‘Stereotypes as Gatekeepers’, where certain professions like computer sciences repel women from entering the field because of the images of who those people are, one of the more powerful points involved the google image results for  ‘nurse’  in pointing out these gender identifications and who we perceive to be capable of or likely to fill a certain role.

Eugene Cho challenged us to consider how we love the ideas of community, compassion, and justice, but where that love goes when that love requires us to act and sacrifices to be made.  His young ngo One Day’s Wages invited people to consider what 1 day of their wages really is and to donate that to the organization in support of the ‘many many small NGOs doing great work out there that you’ve never ever heard of before’.

I spoke about how the stories came about, the stages of production and actually telling these stories, and the trip overall. The dialogue went great, and people seemed moved by the variety and depth of the stories. As I stood in back of the crowd watching along with them, I was impressed and proud at the quality of the stories and the variety of issues they dealt with. Being in a travel bookstore, it was the perfect mix of tourism and sharing of a destination with folks in a socio-cultural investigation that asks one to look at their understanding of both cultures. WWB&M holds similar lectures every Tuesday night.