TCN Newsletter Issue 8: November 2014

Intentional Gatherings Guild

Event Producers’ Solution Session Retreat

 

Cover Image reprinted with permission from Wesley Wolfbear Pinkham

On October 16th, 39 event producers, network weavers, and software developers gathered at Harbin Hot Springs for a 4 day retreat hosted & convened by Jamaica Stevens & Patrick Riley, to discuss the future of events in the emerging culture often called “transformational”. What happened over the weekend was an accelerator and incubator for key players in the transformational ecosystem to uplevel the way conscious festivals, conferences, and summits are held. The topics of the weekend that were discussed included meta-data tracking, game-changing tech platforms, collective land ownership and shared venues, guardianship and right relations, and the leveraging of festivals and conscious events as educational platforms in support of indigenous populations and multicultural collaborations and relations building.

On Thursday night, I arrived at the Harbin Oneness Institute to find 30 beautiful people in a circle and about 10 other key players in the ecosystem on a conference call. I won’t go into the names of people present, because all 39 people present were equally influential in the resonance of the retreat. We did some introductions and spoke to the organizations we represented. Thursday night was casual. We caravanned to the Hot Springs after this collective welcoming, soaked under the stars with anticipation, and talked business until it was time for bed.

Friday morning, we had breakfast (meals throughout the weekend were catered by two angels!) and began the day with a meditation. Then the Solution Session World Cafe activated the group. Jonah Haas from Lucidity Festivals (an event which has moved past simply sustainable and is starting to thrive!) outlined the key questions and threads to unravel around the possibilities of a shared venue, and the potential benefits of forming an event producers association or alliance. We saw there was a need for 1) third party certification programs, 2) resource sharing methods and platforms, and 3) revenue streams. After we brainstormed around these topics, Jonah led a world cafe that addressed 3 key conversations: 1) challenges and concerns around a producer’s association, 2) benefits of a producer’s association, and 3) next steps. The collective consciousness was ridiculously on point. Almost every group had at least 3 or 4 components to their conversations that were almost exactly the same. Two groups even used the same exact idea of a martial arts colored belt system to describe how volunteers and festivals could gamify and level up in the new model of events and participation to build a regenerative enterprise. On Friday Night the first round of ten minute presentations by attending organizations took place. So much talent and amazing  all in one room! Later that night, our group almost got kicked out of the hot springs and pools for being a little too loud with all of the animated conversations around the topic. The conversations throughout the communal housing, pools, and car rides between the two sites were in non-stop productivity mode. Quantum Ripples in full activation.

Saturday Morning started off with a heartfelt story from Debra Giusti, of Harmony Festival, a 33 year old conscious gathering in Northern California that bridged the generation gap between 60’s hippie psychedelic revolution and the present day conscious tech sorcery. The multi-generational mix of attending event producers (from urban tech summits to leadership healing retreats to regenerative enterprise jungle raves) then set the tone for a huge day of sharing the innovations that hve emerged from these technology equipped paradigm shifting evolutionaries. Alist Hub Marketing, Project Nuevo Mundo, Nodesphere, Bloom Portal, Holonomic, UMEOS, Festival Fire, Mythaphi, Keyframe Entertainment, and other tech gnostics presented their platforms for resource sharing, shared marketing practices, and mind-bending front end visualizations for back end data sharing future internets, and fractally distributed security systems. Your concept of the interwebs is about change on a quantum level in the next year as all of these amazing platforms launch at the same time. Saturday night offered a presentation by Yona of EVO, the Emerald Village Organization, an intentional community in southern California, founder of Activated Villages. He blew all of our minds with his real estate and collective land ownership management consultancy. He showed us how much money festivals waste on renting land, and explained how much we could earn from buying a piece of property together in central california and building a permaculture farm, ecovillage, restaurant, hostel, hackerspace, business accelerator space, and permanent infrastructure festival venue that increases property value instead of depleting it. It is possible to live Boom Festival year round while growing and selling beyond-organic food, developing your business and networking with the most innovative minds in the world. It’s coming.

 

Sunday morning saw a closing circle and the official formation of an event producer’s alliance. We all cleaned up our shared living space with a deep sense of camaraderie and departed for the last day of the Bioneers conference in Marin, and more importantly the after party, a legendary explosion of networking in the heart of the redwoods at the Solstice Grove.

The attendees of this weekend retreat brought their full decks to the table, took stock, threw down, and formed an alliance that only moves forward from here. Our collective dream is currently being built and the sky’s the limit with our combined synergistic potential! More on this project as it develops.

 

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Article Written by

Taylor Proffitt

TCN Community Member

Network Ambassador at Project Nuevo Mundo

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