Worknets chatroom code - seeking new server July 24, 2010

Hi Andrius, Ryan and Franz

Ref future access to the chatroom and moving to a different server.

Andrius wrote:
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Pamela, thank you for your letters, and also for inspiring our chat room
and making such great use of it over the years. I will be shutting down
our server. But I can send you a zipped directory with the code. It
should not be very difficult to set up on the Global Villages server or
Dadamac server or else where. I'm in the process of reinstalling my own
laptop - it's broken - so I hope that doesn't take too long.
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Ryan and Franz - what do you think of the possibility of running it on Ryan's server (where other Dadamac things are hosted) or on the Global Villages server, (or elsewhere)
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Andrius - thank you for offering the code. The chat room has been a wonderful resource and it would be a shame to lose it. It has been particularly powerful because of its inclusiveness. The fact that people can access it directly from the Internet (without the need to download anything first) has made such a difference to people who join us from public access points like cyber cafes.

The opportunity to be "at home" on the Internet via the chat room has been an amazing learning experience for me. How long is it now that you have been giving me the chat room at the same time, once a month, every month? It's more than two years - perhaps more than three years - I would need to dig into my archives to find out. For me it is not just the content of the chats that I has been important - but the dynamics. Some time I will try to write up what I have learned there about cross-cultural communication and cross- cultural online communities.

You know I have always seen MInciu Sodas as my online university - the place where I could explore ideas, mix with a wonderful variety of people, see things from different perspectives, do my "field-work" about emerging roles and relationships related to Internet-enabled teaching and learning in non-formal education.  I have learned so much there.

You have given so generously of your vision and time and talents to so many of us. Through Minciu Sodas you grew what was, to me, the most amazing cross-cultural online community of self-directed learner-teachers. In terms of generating 20th century income it did not turn out the way you hoped, but it has been an outstanding success in 21st century wealth generation. I'm not referring to alternative currencies here - although you have had people working on that in Minciu Sodas. I am thinking of alternative measures of wealth that relate to the 21st century Internet-enabled communities - non-financial personal measurement of how rich we are - the knowledge and understanding that we gain, the range and quality of our relationships - amazing shifts regarding how we are placed in the world and inclusiveness.

I know you are now facing huge debts because of your personal investment in Minciu Sodas. I wish you could find a retrospective funder for the work you have done. Even if there is no-one to recognise your work financially perhaps it could at least be recognised in other ways. We could at least start to raise the visibility of the Minciu Sodas story. It would make excellent research material - and if it was written up in academic papers that would be a great cross-cultural break-though between the educational establishment and the Internet-enabled non-formal learning community. I would like to rub minds with you on that idea.
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Pamela.