A Fountain Arising :)

Following our announcement, 900+ folks have applied for 21-day of Interfaith Compassion -- from 53 countries!

To support that geographical breadth, we just launched our "live translation" and "live audio" for ALL our pod posts. To try the translation, change your language preference in settings and then view "permalinks" (or standalone pages, as Marilyn calls them) and voila -- it'll  (smartly) translate it to that language on the fly. If a user doesn't know about this feature, and you pro-actively translate something (LOTS of people did that with our beta launch last month), you'll to be asked to change your default (like in the thumbnail image attached). This means that for everything you post, we'll be managing 55 copies and an MP3 file! Just keeping it all together is an engineering feat. But let's first see how this stands the stress test of our upcoming pod. :)

Back to the challenge, we fleshed out a comprehensive share kit which will help us do more of this collaborative action in the future; many organizations have come together, and Preeta just sent a note to past Awakin speakers, so this will be a nice new capacity to grow over time. In addition, we have a solid crew of 22 (including Trishna -- yay!) that Marilyn will be laddering with her usual genius. And as Rohit joked, our speaker list is enough to last a year; Masami-san and Rev. Heng Sure are joining us around 2AM in their timezones! In fact, people are writing to us pro-actively to support, offer and nurture.

As such, thousand people for a broadcast type gathering is nice -- but also not a huge deal. Our original Kindness challenge had 7 thousand; gratitude challenge had 12 thousand. But what is a big deal is our Pod platform that gives us the potential to "deepcast", build a rockin' many-to-many field, and create really rich ripples. With thousand people from 53 countries and 55 languages (+ audio!) and skilled volunteers all coming together for 21 days(!) to cultivate timeless virtues with a priceless price in deep-data matrix -- it's like a cluster-bomb of compassion. Ok, that might not be the best metaphor. :)

In parallel, our India crew is going nuts with offline activities from Awakins to Karma Kitchen (with 80 volunteer applications for one event!) to SpiriTed talks (Swara just knocked one out of the ballpark last month!), to some truly poineering experiments in Education that Parag is seeding ... culminating in a nice multi-city reunion in Surat this weekend. And that's just warm-up for Meghna anchoring a second HHH retreat next weekend.

I'm sure all these online and offline ripples will continue to weave itself into what Vinoba might describe as a "fountain arising with many distributed water drops."