I tonight chatted with a friend from Austria living in Benghazi, Libya. She wrote that no one would have imagined that so many people would be ready to stand with their lives for their country, the people and freedom. It is is the most spiritual time she ever experienced and an overwhelming experience to be in midst of this upheaval. Many governments in the West would have preferred that everything goes on like ever before and to call out a bit here and there against Gaddafi, but continue to collaborate. What happened in Libya people experience like a wonder which could not at all be foreseen and what gives an impression of what is going to happen in 2012.

I sent her some lines of what Sri Kumar said at New Year’s day about the present year:

“A lot is being talked about the unity and peace of humanity but very less effort is being put forth in that direction. Every human being thinks that he should be happy and all his friends and relatives should be happy but when it comes to action, very little is being done for the welfare of fellow beings. There are many spiritual and service organizations all over the globe talking of welfare and peace but not much action is being done in that direction. Everyone should put effort and contribute their part for the welfare of humanity.
In the present situation, we cannot say that this year would be highly prosperous for us as we can see that there in crisis around. The political scenario in India is highly alarming. Even the most powerful and developed nations in the world are in a state of turmoil, economically and politically. Even though India is economically developing, its political issues stand as hindrances to economic development. So this is our present state. This state may continue for the next 5 years. In such a state, just by thinking that everything should be fine is not enough. A strong effort should be put in that direction.
We cannot do anything individually to change the scenario. The only thing we can do is to pray. This is because no one will change their ideas and accept others ideas. Everyone believes his own truth. There is one truth which is the combination of all these truths. To know that truth we should dissolve all our ideas and pray to the Lord. We should pray for the welfare of humanity, our country and also pray that the political leaders of our country should transform into better ones or they may be replaced with better leaders. Just praying for our own welfare or our family’s is no spirituality.
Also we should pray for the welfare of the ones serving the society and the country. In any organization or society or country, there are 20% such sincere workers. It is through them that the Lord works actively. Our prayer should add strength to such ones as we all benefit by the work of such ones.”

She said that it is exactly the same in Libya and maybe that the radical changes will be an example for other countries as well. It is so inspiring to see that the “spoiled kids” went out into the streets and have risked their lives and in many cases lost their lives for the common weal. They are praying a lot that no more blood is spilled and that this striving for peace and joy might be a model for the world and might become a wildfire of freedom. And at the same time continue to strive and to keep in contact with the inner centre in midst of all turbulences.

Reflection of light in a silver plate after a water ritual

There were some turbulent days after our landing from India: 4 days later we moved to a new apartment in a neighbour village. Though we had prepared a lot in advance it was an intense course. The time of leaving the old place where we had lived for 16 years and now establishing at the new location reminds me of the interlude between two incarnations: All lessons learnt in the past life get stored into the permanent atoms and then the old sheaths are thrown off. Then new sheaths gather around the centre and the cells build up the new body as the dwelling place of the soul.

Many things were left behind, given to the waste disposal… In the new apartment many things did not fit in the way we had it in the old home: How to arrange the furniture, the home office, the meditation place, where to hand up the pictures, which new order to establish in the bathroom or the kitchen? A lot of decisions had to be made in common, and now, 10 days later, many things have found their new places, but a number of boxes with numerous articles still have to be emptied… So the “soul” has taken possession of its new body of incarnation.

Not only in the house, also in the surroundings adaptations have to be done: New neighbours, new places in the garage or the basement; The way to the office or to the shopping centres have changed, the distances and the perspectives are different. The new flat offers a wider horizon, a panoramic view through some trees and over some houses to the Alps. The house is located at the foot of a hill and we yesterday discovered some streets and paths… The ringing of the church bells gives us the time and meter of the day (it is just ringing while I write these lines). A new rhythm unfolds the dynamics of which we are still to discover. A new beginning, a new phase of our lives.

Saturday morning sunrise over the neighbour farmhouse, seen from the office room

View from the bedroom: a little stone cave with a meditating Buddha

View from the balcony: Some old timbered houses and the Alps in the background

The house seen from the neighbour farmhouse; we are living in the ground floor apartment.

View down from the hill behind our home

View of the Alps from the hill.

Last Wednesday I received a mail which seemingly came from an Indian friend. When reading it in the evening, I had a short moment of hesitation, but then I got “trapped” by the story and the fact that certain points in the mail seemed to be authentic – but it was faked. My friend told me he came from India to Madrid to help a niece in health troubles. She had to undergo surgery and since the operation would be too expensive in Spain he decided to bring her back to India. He now asked me for financial help with a substantial sum in Euros, and said not knowing about our financial situation even if I just could help with some part of it would be warmly welcome and he would pay it back as soon as he is back home. He indicated an address in Madrid, with his full name (which isn’t part of his e-mail ID) and “confirmed” to me the e-mail was “really” from my friend and he asked me to transfer the money via Western Union.

So I looked up in our Euro account and saw that there was just enough. I tried to transfer it via Western Union with online banking, but since the opening of the transfer section takes 24 hs, I phoned to the support hotline and a very kind lady told me that I also can transfer the money via Cash International, which would even be cheaper. She then guided me through the process…

Early next morning I woke up with a certain suspicion why my friend had greeted me with “hello” and not the usual “Dear Brother …” Maybe he was under stress, I thought, reminding me that my wife suspects me often to be over-critical.

Later in my office I had a quick look into my private mail account to see if anything had come in from my friend. There it was. He thanked me for the quick response and asked if I could let him know the Western Union code for identifying. I wrote him I had sent the money via Cash International and didn’t get a code but suppose that he will need to identify with a passport.

Only then I saw another e-mail from a Spanish friend who is in Visakhapatnam, India, at the moment, with the header “Urgent”. I opened the mail and read: “The email ID of hotmail xxx has got hacked, and they succeeded. Please don’ t respond to any mail coming from that email ID hotmail. It’s very important that you inform everybody who can be concerned….” I answered, thanking her and telling: “It is already too late, I reacted on the e-mail.”

Since I couldn’t access to the Postfinance account from my office I phoned to my wife and she immediately contacted the support. They said, it’s already too late, the money is out. But they told her to contact the police, and this my wife did. The police then contacted again the security service of the bank and they could stop the transfer process. So virtually “in the last minute” the money was saved. It was only some days ago that I read about the hacking of hotmail and other accounts from big providers, but I hadn’t imagined that I would become a victim and I thought I knew their tricks, being in touch with such questions also professionally.

I sent an information to the mailing list of our group members informing them about the hacked account, and another Indian friend replied: “The hackers always do that and try their luck. But I’m glad the transfer was duly stopped and saved yourself a lot of trouble. There is a blog some victim wrote. Very informative.” And later he wrote: “The fraud e-mails have good language to convince and catch victims. They present the picture beautifully. Quite a few of my friends’ mails have been hacked that way – same – asking for money – stuck in some city! They send them out to contacts in the address book and look for any unfortunate victim to respond! It is really lucky that your transaction was thwarted. I delete such mails and then their address in my book so that I would not forward any mails to that hacked one unwittingly, later on.”

In the evening I heard from an IT-specialist how he got tricked online and lost some money, though he knew very well of possible tricks. And yesterday another friend told me how she got trapped very intelligently through a skype chat contact and lost some money.

We have to be very alert.

A way in the mist leading “nowhere”

Today at my office I received a link about a very fascinating campaign which run in the City of Frankfurt / Main (Germany) from October 1st to 31st, 2010: FRANKFURT TEILT (:) (Frankfurt shares). The project with the motto “Sharing makes happy” encouraged citizens and business-people from Frankfurt to share part of their money, their ideas or their time with people in need. More than 100 corporates and thousands of people joined in. Every participant could decide himself what he wanted to share. A beverage company gave away a bottle to people in need in Romania and in German flood areas for every box of mineral water sold in Frankfurt, another citizen sold old things on a flea market and bought with the money nursing cushions and child’s seats for a child hospital in Frankfurt. Not only money was shared, One person offered to work for a week at a reforestation project in Switzerland.

On the website frankfurt-teilt.de, a blog Sharety.org (play on words with share and charity) with the motto:  “Sharety is the belief in Tomorrow” and “We love to share” as well as in social networks like Facebook everyone could make is commitment visible to others and thus encourage friends also to share something from their lives. On the website Spirit of Sharety.com there is an online book about ”Spirit of Sharity. Eine neue Philosophie des Teilens” (Spirit of sharity. A New Philosophy of Sharing) – also with a “Register of the most important expressions”, explaining why sharing is a good means against egocentricity.

The campaign was very professionally organised and the organisers limited the project on a month. Thus they reduced the pressure for the participants not to bind themselves with long-term committments, and at the same time they increased the pressure for those who did not yet participate. This way the campaign became a discussion topic all over the city. Here you can read in German some lines about the project – making sharing visible.

Last week I came to know about a very innovative and inspiring initiative, “Fairtrade Language School”, Glovico.org, developed by some Germans. On their site it says:

“During a research trip to Eritrea focussing on social entrepreneurship the founder of Glovico – Tobias Lorenz – realized that after decades of traditional development cooperation we should look for more technology-based and innovative ways to allow developing countries to prosper. Looking for entrepreneurial solutions to tackle worldwide poverty the idea was born to initiate intercultural dialogue and generate income at the same time. Tobias started to wonder: Who could teach languages better than native speakers? In this way Glovico tries to realize a vision that combines entrepreneurship with social change.”

Glovico offers “Study with native speakers from Latin America and Africa via Skype and do good at the same time. You get affordable, convenient language lessons and provide additional income for some, who really need it: that’s Fairtrade 2.0!”

On Glovico you can learn Spanish or French or become a language teacher. If you are not satisfied with a lesson, your money will be reimbursed…

Glovico is a Social Business, i.e. the main mission is to offer entrepreneurs from Latin America and Africa the opportunity to earn additional income through teaching their mother tongues. At the same time Glovico promotes inter-cultural dialogue. It is important for them to remain independent from governmental money and to finance themselves. Learn more about it through the following video or on their site.

I today was at the annual meeting of a group of web people from Swiss NGOs. The meeting was at the offices of Greenpeace in Zurich and about 30 persons from different NGOs attended. This year’s topic was the use of Social Media / Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook and Twitter for NGOs. Some of the organisations were quite active in this field, while others observed with a certain scepticism or did not become active due to missing personal resources.

After the presentation of some campaigns run partly on Facebook there was a lively discussion about best practices and difficulties with the work. In general it was observed that it is quite difficult to get people becoming active besides click-activism in a social media campaign. It is also sometimes difficult to reduce complex situations to 120 letters – the language has to be very concise and pithy.

In the afternoon there was an input of Peter Hogenkamp, a person who is professionally working since years with blogs and social media, as a publisher and consultant. He started with a video: What the hell is social media? summing up in a frantic way ten reasons why you should get involved with Twitter and the like. He encouraged the use with many examples, but his style was frantic like the video – the nervous style of this media-junkie

A similar input in this NGO group made me start blogging 4 years ago and discussions let me to start a Facebook page for my office and for the Circle of Good Will. Now I just launched a Twitter account, only to reserve the address, as the speaker had proposed – what I’m going to do with it time will show.

What the hell is social media – from the video

I today was at the headquarters of Microsoft Switzerland, where there was the launch of MS Office 2010. They had invited me and a few other representatives of organisations, companies and agencies, who are “early adopters” of MS Sharepoint 2010 (here is a video, not from our meeting, but a later one today.) At my office we are about to introduce a document management system for better collaboration, which will be done with this new technology and I’m the responsible for the project. An agency working for Microsoft had done an interview and a video with me for their product marketing presentation a few weeks ago (it should go online next week). That’s why I got the invitation…

The meeting was in their solution and innovation center near Zürich, one of 6 such centers world-wide and of 3 in Europe.

They presented a number of new features and their reflections behind. The keynote speaker showed some interesting slides, one of them showing that in our society more and more people are knowledge workers and it will increase in the future. How to work with knowledge and what challenges come out of this development. There is a profound impact of the demographic shift to less births and less people in the productive age, who have to be more productive. And the way the different generations work and live changes profoundly: the “boomers”, born from 1946 to 65 have different attitudes to work than the “generation x” from 65-80 and again a shift to the “generation y” from 80 to 2000…

After a discussion of the people present about their experiences with the new technology we were invited to have a tour through the headquarters 4th floor. There we saw a fantastic interactive computer with intuitive handling,  just touchscreen and impressive ways of dealing with visual objects. I typed a bit on a virtual keyboard and played with the finger-zoom. It is really getting the imagination substantiated and working like with etheric manifestation on a screen – by the way the opening screen was like a water pool: the whole surface of the screen was full of little ripples, and you had the impression to put your hands into water, when touching the screen.

The “magic” was coming out of this “box” under the screen…

We then walked through the offices, where there were no more individual workspaces, but different kinds of rooms, for silent concentration, group work, small exchanges or relaxing. The lady who lead the tour explained how working and leisure time are more and more intermingling – people work during the weekend, but take off time during the week for private activities. Their teams meet less physically and people coming to virtual meetings are spread over different places or even continents. Aquarian waves of living expressed through high-tech surroundings, and not at all in a context where they would consider this as Aquarian…

I yesterday was at a fascinating conference of the Swiss fundation of certified non-profit organisations about Pictorial Worlds of NGOs. It was held at the Paul Klee museum -  a place for images…

Pictures are used for fund-raising, for sensitizing the public and for informing about people in need. The discussions were about the effect of pictures, what is a good picture and what are the possibilities of the language of pictures. And where are limits and dangers of misuses.

There were very interesting inputs. The head of the media service of the catholic church showed how today there is such a flood of images, that images are destroying themselves. The speed of the image flood keeps increasing. There is a trend from static images to moving images. Images try to capture attention, to rise emotions, and this often by means of creating irritations.

As an example of irritation he showed an unusual video about accident prevention – there are more people dying by stumbling than by cars. Irritating pictures are often used, but they can (consciously or unconsciously hurt feelings like the exposition arranged with plasticized dead bodies or pictures hurting religious feeling like the Danish caricature of Mohammad. Personality rights can be violated, when images are used without the consent of the persons shown, especially with children from developing countries.

A well-known Swiss filmmaker spoke about his portraits of people living on the margin of society – people in need, physically or mentally handicapped people, so-called “local idiots”. He tries to give them a voice and show the individual reality, which might deviate from social norms. He tries to “meet levels” and not to stand above the portrayed ones.

The last speaker was from a marketing agency, he spoke about the problems of time and money in creating impact: You see about 2000 pictures a day, everybody wants to have your attention. He presented examples about what is a powerful image. He gave 9 theses, seemingly contradicting themselves:

The strongest image is positive – showing a video clip of positive emotions. The strongest image is negative – often used; is a symbol; is created in the head (he showed a text of an Indian campaign against killing female fetuses, just a text describing how you can kill the fetus and try 3 month later to get a boy…); can be just a phrase (an inspiring campaign of a Japanese city turning its destiny from a big coal mining town to a non-successful amusement park going bankrupt, and now to a city of love where there is no divorce -recreating its destiny and attracting people from all over the country); is costly; is simple; is an experience (a campaign of Red Cross Portugal selling hope in a shop); and is a reality.

The strongest image factor is the idea. And this is true also for other inspiring activities. Inspiration comes through ideas, and this is the moving factor – not money or greatness. Master DK says: “Energy follows thought”. This is an applied form of it.

The hall where the meeting took place. For me the red decoration was a symbol of the images crying for attention.

The Klee museum: Moving lines of attention

I was today at a Social Media Marketing conference in Zurich. Marketeers and web-consultants spoke about using social trends for your website with different tools, platforms and strategies, for increasing one’s presence in the communities. While most speakers gave very interesting presentations, others weren’t much relevant for me or seemed to give an exposure of the portfolio of their agency, spicing it with slogans. As usual you had to filter yourself to get the nuggets out of the sand.

I was much interested in the way the dialogue between business and users is being orchestrated and in understanding better the strategies and technologies. It was fascinating to see how the mechanics of human curiosity and gossiping are being used in this. Most relevant is to understand the users and what they want. This is often not so clear, and easily the gap causes miscommunication.

As expected at such a conference, people were busily twittering the whole time. There was a feeling in the room of keeping oneself in a state of excitement and continuous communication. The last speaker even highlighted this as a kind of telepathic inter-relationship between all participants. I thought I don’t want this kind of permanent interconnectedness. Inter-relationship is not just in talking, but, more so, in silence and in subtle linking through meditative work – this not particularly being the sphere of social media marketing.

So I didn’t join the conference with twittering or linking in, trying to keep the everyday information overkill with some inner filters at a distance. I had some talks and took some good inspirations back home. I now ask myself if I shall nevertheless do a step into the twitter-world after some steps into Face-Booking. I saw interesting vistas, but time is scarce…

One’s own website is just the top of an iceberg where the sphere of social media networks like facebook, twitter, flickr and the like offer fields for extension of the scope of influence.

The website of my office is now 8 years old. We came to the conclusion that it needs a brush-up, a fundamental renovation, because it has immensely grown and it is not always easy for surfers to find what they are looking for. Furthermore the ways people surf have changed and thus the demands of usability have changed, too. My web-team is setting up the technical infrastructure on a new system, now we want to do a re-engineering of the content structure, the design and the prioritisation of the contents: Not everything which is easily visible is also of the same relevance… We have studied the statistics, observed how the major flows of surfers behave, made quite some reflections, set up a team of specialists from the different departments…

Last Wednesday I had the first meeting, together with a colleague from marketing, with a specialist from a web agency accompanying us with the renovation of the website. He is a consultant and designer.  We were discussing the perspectives the surfers seeking information might have. The designer proposed to use personas, fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use our site. I found it fascinating, but in view of the complexity of the site there will probably be too many options. We were discussion re-grouping the existing contents. I realised how much I’m stuck with the structures I’m used to see – an outsider comes with totally different perspectives. The process brought me into some kind of a creative confusion, losing the sight of the greater vision in view of so many details to be considered. It reminded me of situations of transformation on the spiritual path. You sometimes go through times of confusion, where the path no longer is clear before your eyes and where things which for a long time were obvious no longer seem to be so. You are looking for new order systems which are more fitting for the demands of the time.

Thursday afternoon I had a meeting with the redactor of the communication section. She also has quite some web experiences, having worked in this area in the States for a while. I described her the situation and my process of confusion. She said, “Why don’t we group all the different fields in a matrix-like way according to what the people want to do: Just to get information, to  get help from one of our offers, to support the work either by donations or by help – volunteer work, blood donation and the like.” It sounded very convincing. We re-grouped the major areas of the site, saw that it makes sense, but also, that new questions popped up. Will our system be so flexible to deal with such a re-mix of contents and demands?

Friday I submitted the ideas to the colleague from marketing and she was quite fascinated by the outcome. For next week we reserved a whole afternoon to work out the rearrangements of the whole site. I prepared cards for every page so that we can freely shift and re-group the contents. I though, sometimes in life it would be good to do such re-grouping and rearranging. It’s the Uranian energy which does this with us if we don’t do it ourselves. It fits very well into the present moment of the start of the new annual cycle with Aries, the fresh energy of beginning.

“Stairway to the sun”, in the park next to my office. Only one week ago we had icy weather with snow.