generatekindness.org

Kinda new agey, but there’s bits of truth everywhere, eh?

Got to hit the annual East Nashville Tomato Arts Festival. Last year, I was “King” of the festival, which required me to roam around and be kingly, wearing a really, really, hot costume for the month of August in Nashville. This year, I chose to participate in the Festival in a different way – handing out Generate Kindness stickers. Got the idea to take pictures of some of the people I gave stickers to. Don’t know why it took 10 years to think of this, but I loved it. People were super receptive to having their pictures taken and I was really struck by everyone’s smile. Could GenerateKindness make people happy? Really? w00t!

Just installed a mini-gallery plugin on wordpress, so let’s see if it works:

I’m going to keep notes of the incremental changes that happen to the GK site on the blog. Just ’cause, um, I don’t know exactly. Recent changes:

- migrated from HTML site to WordPress
- added donation can widget
- better video support
- way better commenting system
- much better design
- vastly improved social media integration
- successfully moved accordion nav widget
- basic cafepress integration

ahead:
testing everything. (try doing stuff and if it doesn’t work, add a comment here)
tweeting/blogging about new site launch
thermometer to show total donations and total costs
transparent accounting: a costs page with a summary (and ideally scanned receipt) of costs
create workflow for validating old sticker requests so we don’t send stickers to a bad address
update workflow for printing shipping labels
investigate 501(c)3 status / fiscal sponsorship
video comments
calculate carepress item markup as N stickers sent to Europe or X stickers sent to the US, etc.
collaborators in kindness: a program to distribute the workload of distributing stickers
Worldmap visitor log
ad network if traffic warrants

What other features would be cool for GenerateKindness?

The Mormons say it: be kind.

A shopowner in Jersey gets held up, whips out a shotgun and commits what is without a doubt, one of the more RANDOM acts of kindness.

I’ve been looking around for blog items for a series on the teachings of kindness and compassion of the major religions. See, I have a theory that there is a fundamental truth in all the world’s religions about kindness. They’re all saying kinda the same thing about this. Here’s the first I found:

Iqra tells the story of the kindness of the Queen of Egypt, who fished the baby Moses out of the reeds. She’s four. And amazing.

WooH00!  Looks like we may well be on our way to migrating to WordPress.  Doesn’t look like some of the content made it across, though…

I am so down for the Charter of Compassion. This video was recorded in February 2008. The Charter she mentions was unveiled in November, 2009.

Nashville is virgin territory for the Generate Kindness project. I’ve been having fun dropping stickers at events and in coffee shops and am intrigued to see what happens. Could Nashville be any kinder, actually? Well, there are still homeless people in Nashville, so I’m not sure what to say about that.

Anyway, to the folks who’ve sent in envelopes recently, I’m going to be doing another opening video soon. Send more stamps! Thanks to everyone who has. Very helpful – postage is the biggest cost center of the project. Sending stickers internationally costs more than twice postage to send stickers domestically in the US.

More soon, I promise!