The Awakening the Dreamer Facilitator community has just finished celebrating the third Global Gathering. In previous years we've been able to gather a significant number of people in one location here in the USA, but by this year the community has become so large and so dispersed across 6 continents that it is no longer common-sense, carbon-sense or financial-sense for people to come in to one central location. So, over the weekend of September 25 - 27, 2009, we saw a series of linked local events all around the world.
Our proceedings were opened by the New Zealand team with Maori blessings, and closed at the other end of the world time clock here on the west coast of the USA. In between we had keynote speakers uploaded in one country for download elsewhere and we had reports on the spread of the Initiative in the world and the imminent arrival of the new international version of the Symposium “V-2”, which will be made available to all of the locations using the web.
The most ambitious target, to link all of communities in real time with live-streaming, was only partially successful; our challenge had been to do this using freely available web-technology and for some locations this just wasn't possible.
Every location reported on the value of gathering communities of facilitators in one place, to refresh, revitalize and plan forward, and many more people joined in remotely or viewed the videos available in their own time. And the gathering was a triumph of self-organization; the design team which met weekly in the months running up to the weekend included folks from China, New Zealand, Australia, USA, Belgium and the UK; this was an event for the community organized by the community and as such, a great demonstration of what's possible.
All of the materials of the gathering can be viewed on the ATD Blog site (at http://blog.awakeningthedreamer.org/global-gathering-2009/).
Please visit and enjoy what was accomplished, and let the seed of what's possible for next year begin to germinate in your mind.
