An invitation to participate in an event which will help chart our way through an uncertain future.

Part A.

(Please note: the mission statement is at the end of this vision statement).

                Just exactly what is a world changing event? Have you ever participated in one?
                 If we were to conduct a random street survey and ask “what are some of the recent world changing events you know of that have happened this century”? what do you presume people would answer?

                What indeed would you answer?

                I tend to think that people might say:“ the election of the new American president, the 911 event in New York city, the American invasion of Iraq, the South Asian tsunami. The 2008 Economic Meltdown”.

                Those are the six that immediately come into my mind retrieved from TV memory circuits, and I find it interesting that all four events revolve around trauma and destruction in some way.
                If I were to conduct another street survey and rephrase the question:

“what were recent positive and uplifting world changing events”?

                 What then do you think the answer might be?

                The Live Aide concert for Ethiopia organized by Bob Geldolf set an example for other musicians to organise benefit aide concerts. We are often hard pressed to think of major positive events, as mass media conditions us to accept negative events.

                But what about the future?

I am involved with a small team of people who are facilitating a world changing event without precedent to be hosted in a small rural town in the Western Australian Wheatbelt.

It was decided to name it “The Global Sustainability Gathering’ because no other event carried that name.

There are many reasons we decided not to host the event in the Perth Convention centre located on the edge of the Swan River. That building was constructed with a government subsidy of $350 million.

                What we find exhilarating is the fact that the event (which due to it’s originality is likely to gain considerable media attention) was not originally funded by any government agencies. Our world changing event is being financed by a very profound idea, and the need to find solutions to the challenges of the time we are now living through.

                The development of the concept was not seeded by any think tank.

                No corporations that issue dividends to shareholders as their primary function were involved in the original development of the Global Sustainability Gathering for the purposes of product development or research. It is not being promoted by a public relations lobby firm that also represents any industry destructive to the environment etc.

                The Harmonic Convergence was an event that took place in over 3000 locations around the planet in 1987, and there were no financial incentives or backers for that event. This originated with Jose Arguelles, who has been invited to the Global Sustainability Gathering.

                Approximately two thousand people can physically attend this unique event, while the vast majority will follow or hear about it through web sites, E Zines, Web Rings, Blogs and many alternate new media journals and so on.

                There will be a Second life interface as well, the first of it’s kind ever attempted. There will be an audience in an auditorium in another country town. It has 400 seats and a large screen the size seen in theaters. On that screen is projected the screen from a laptop, which is showing a location known as “Conference Island’ in Second Life.

                In Second’s Life’s Conference Island are a number of digital people in attendance all dressed in strange clothing that people wear inside the computer generated world known as Second Life.

                There also is another screen on Conference Island, and onto that screen the people in Second Life see the real people sitting in the theatre in that town’s Cummins Theater because there are TV cameras streaming the image and audio from that audience into the web and onto the screen on Conference Island in Second Life!

                This process has few precedents.

                Do you know of the Burning Man festival in Nevada?

                The people in attendance at the GSG (Global Sustainability Gathering) are mostly not staying in Hotel or Motel rooms.

                No, they are staying in a number of tent villages, that have lots of motor homes and campervans in that “village”. Each village is limited to 300 residents due to the portable toilets that service that village.

                Each village has been asked to name itself with a combination of two colours. Green-Purple. Orange-Indigo. Red-Red and so on. Some artists have taken that idea literally and there are many objects that relate to that villages theme to be seen within that village.

Part B.

The Essential Vision:

                              "To gather together people from selected web sites, green medias and NGO’s etc so they can meet face to face - thus allowing those who have knowledge, insight, and high aspiration to not only meet but socialize and exchange ideas, information, positive solutions; all in the relaxed stress free non toxic environment of a friendly charismatic small Australian country town away from a capitol city".

We won’t have to limit the event to just those sustainability-ecology-environment organizations who have an internet presence.

Our aim is to also bring together those who organise related conferences, forums and festivals hosted all over the planet, with those who create and manage the new information internet sites and forums, with authors, scientists, spiritual teachers, philosophers, publishers, and academics who write on these subjects plus including those government agencies concerned with creating a sustainable future.

To that mix we add a most essential ingredient  - Media.

Thus, to the soup mix, we add editors and journalists from over 100 niche media magazines and journals we have located who are now servicing the topics of sustainability, ecology, consciousness and social justice, and then the soup is bound and spiced by bringing television cameras, community radio, new digital media, still photographers and documentary film makers onto this rural stage of assembled people from all walks of life, nations and professions.

Hey presto ,a new nexus without precedent! All media, be it mass corporate or niche alternative media look to report on, and cover new and innovative events in the inter-connected digital age.

Thus another way of perceiving the Gathering….see it as a New Nexus but not located in a conference centre, but through out the total area of a small Australian country town.

So what about the media?

Do a time warp.

You are at the event.

You are a journalist.

Your goal was to track down some of the niche media’s that were meant to be at the Gathering, respectable media that you never even knew existed. There are over 300 small magazine publishers here, with both editors and their freelance journalist representatives.

You want to get lots of interviews. There are also a great number of representatives from information rich web magazine sites and you really do not know how and where to start – it seems that these web site administrators have come from all over the planet, and many of those sites have links to literally thousands of environment forums and Web Rings or Blogs.

You start now to understand the concept of getting people out from cyberspace into a physically networked environment.

You know the frustrations of getting interviews at a conventional conference.

At conventional conferences today there might be a room set aside for the media to do interviews, especially if it is at a large conference centre. The media line up outside in the corridor and the person doing the interview is kept in the room like a panther in a cage, with a press agent directing the show like a traffic cop.

 And the other option? This is where some featured keynote speakers are set behind a large table, while across from them the media are assembled, almost like a confrontation of two teams lining each up to do battle across no man’s land. Again, press handlers direct the show – for control is the issue.

At the gathering, by contrast, well informed specialist journalists interested in sustainability, consciousness and ecological responsibility, will have time to interview people at leisure and even conduct their interviews over a period of days not just minutes. TV crews will be able to assemble their “talking heads” or even create spontaneous panel sessions where the crew decides the ideal location and backdrop around the town.

 In fact the town has a Insulberg which has 360 degree views over the Australian Landscape.

In war zones journalists improvise. So here radio journalists could set up a mobile studios from small motor home while internet broadcasters will set up their global broadcasts from a laptop that might be in a tent.

As has been stated before – there has never been a media event like this staged  in Australia.

Part C

The Village

                Did your mind create a picture with out seeing any photos from Australia? Our research shows that there are well over a thousand internet sites currently concerned both with the principle of sustainability, the clean renewable energy industries and ecological preservation. Just have a look at one of them www.ecosustainable.com.au to see what is “out there’ on the Internet.

SO CAN I CREATE A  PICTURE WITH WORDS?

                Without a conference centre and five star hotel, vastly different types of connections can be made…..under the stars around a campfire or barbeque in a nature setting not around a noisy bar with techno playing.

                Groups can form according to natural laws – large or small in any shape and size, with people coming and going at will. As at a party, individuals will move from group to group, or village to village, as their attention and interest varies according to the conversation, activities, or presentation going on in any given place.

                As people will be staying in caravans, tents, and mobile homes, private meetings will also take place outside a campervan, or with larger groupings of people near the ‘Village Common’  i.e. the centre established with-in Kellerberrin’s showground and sports ground where a geodesic dome may be constructed for the event.

                No police sirens, no hovering helicopters, no flashing neon lights, no chauffer driven limos. People walk every where and during the gathering some even use the electric scooters provided. There have even been  push bikes provided and after the event these are being donated to villages in East Africa.

                There is only one small electric car that was made in India but people tend to look at it rather than drive it around the town.

Looking at the Village Common on the central green grassed area with-in the Showgrounds, you wonder if this is what villages could have been like before the invention of automobiles.

Your eyes immediately notice the strange array of building forms, almost as if this is a science fiction film set, from another place, from another time. Now you understand why the organizers continually asked people to look at those photos on Burning Man web site www.burningman.com

Near the media centre there is a very strange looking sculpture that has been made from car body parts and recycled materials it holds night lights.

You see strange temporary structures made from steel and tin, a small cluster of teepees and even a yurt! These simple shade structures made with tin and hessian are off to one side, and were the winning entries from a student architectural competition. The wide variety assemblage of temporary building structures was not fully understood until you took that ride just after dawn in the hot air balloon.

And that was a mistake of the organizers, they should have had more than one balloon because it was so popular there was a long waiting list to board it, and you nearly missed out on that life enriching experience. The wide flat West Australia horizon at dawn almost matched the spectacle of the stars in the Milky Way last night. The immense number of stars overhead at night makes you realise just how dirty city air is, for the dust and city lights masked 99% of the stars now seen in this night sky.

As you slowly walk around this special purpose sustainability village you suddenly realize that ‘yes’ you are out of time and place – and it is hard put a time fix on it.

In 1997 when you first heard the world sustainability exposed through mass media you never ever thought that a change in global consciousness would happen so fast in the next decade.

Around the outer perimeter of the showground central complex there seems to be every shape of caravan ever made in Australia, in fact it looks more like a caravan expo than like any camping site in Australia.

The media centre, 50 meters from the showground was once a sanitarium for girls with asthma but that is another story from the town’s history, of interest only to historians not the futurists at the event.

PART  D

Administration details

At a conventional conference people walk around wearing an identification tag of some sort, most often a photo and name encased in plastic, and it is hung around the neck or worn with a clip on clothing.

This will not apply at the gathering, just as it does not at the Burning man Festival.

                At a conventional conference (but not at the convergence), the time of each session or presentation is strictly controlled much as a professional’s everyday work day is – where everyone always seems to be frantically running against the clock!

                Attendees at conventional conferences usually hurriedly race from session to session till they are exhausted.

                That system dictates that there are a few keynote speakers and presenters where a few ‘key’ people are given centre stage and everyone in attendance sits listening in silence like disciples as their master’s feet!

                Then later with the conference dinner, attendees often sit with strangers around large tables in a vast room. Sometimes at the dinner there also will be another address from on high with the image of the speaker larger than life on a screen behind the speaker. Someone interesting who you may have met earlier that day might now be sitting at a table on the far side of the vast room and it is impossible to talk with them.

We believe, by contrast, that at a gathering, a natural law of movement and attraction would apply, much as it does at any large party. For example, in Hollywood’s Oscars awards night, those famous official after presentation parties are as important as the rigid formalized televised presentation from the stage of the theatre!

To be brutally honesty with you – the informal unplanned face to face meetings that will take place at a Global Sustainability Gathering is really what the whole show is all about!

Meeting face to face with those people who you have been emailing recently all over the planet but have never met.

Or meeting the people behind the web sites you have been admiring and viewing for years.

Or being in a small space listening to a journalist or author who you have admired ever since you encountered them in print on a screen or on a page.

                It might be hard to locate individuals scattered all over the site.

                So just how will you find someone you want to meet there if no one is wearing name tags and the people are spread out in camps all around the town site?

If you have read to this point I do thank you as time is important to us all.
Your mind has now created the event, and this is all about manifesting and co-creating.

A MISSION STATEMENT

The GSG will gather people together in a pleasant unique environment away from a capital city. It will then assist, inspire, motivate, and communicate with “agents of change” – those people in media, NGO administrators, civil society, and local government; as well as private individuals, artists and academics who are in a position to appreciate, manifest, appreciate, and apply cutting edge ideas and bring societies closer to real sustainability.

We do have the approval of a suitable town in Western Australia to host this event which we started planning in October 2005, and are now making public here.