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"YOUscription" - the new name

by  peter @  June 26, 2008 17:05 

In the beginning, there was "LastWorker". Then came "Holonation". And now, finally (I hope!), we have "YOUscription". Three names for this one site in only 1 and 1/2 years. Sheesh.

Well, in my OneManIncubator consulting business,  I've counseled clients that the name of their site isn't really that important. That is, it can't make an unsuccessful business successful. But it could do the opposite. In other words, you can't pick a good name, but you can certainly pick a bad one.

"LastWorker" was the first name of this site. That name was a "bad" choice because it was taken from a Christian parable.  And even though I'm not exactly Christian (although I am a fan of most teachings of Jesus), and even though this site can't be characterized as such, that name rubbed against some folks who thought it pigeonholed the site as a Chistian one. Strike one for naming.

So about a year ago, I changed the name of the site again. This time to "Holonation". Here is  some detail on the switch from LastWorker to Holonation. And here is a deeper discussion on the meaning of "Holonation".

Lesson #2: If the name of your site is obscure, at least make sure it's a very short and simple walk to explain its meaning. For example, the name "Google" is explained as follows:  "'Googol' is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. ... Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web."

Simple enough. But try that for "Holonation". Explaining what a "holon" is is much trickier (i.e. "a holon is something that is simulatenously made up of parts, and also a part of larger phenomena" -- argh!), as is explaining what that philosophical term has to do with this site (i.e. "wisdom of crowds", sharing health stories, etc.).

Thus I came upon YOUscription. If that name ain't clear to you, maybe I've screwed up again.  But at least that name now enables a fairly straightforward About page.

Comments (0)

Site Migration

by  peter @  May 07, 2008 20:55 

I'm in the process of migrating holonation.com from a lousy shared hosting provider to a pretty sweet virtual hosting service. Difference with the latter is that I control the everything about the server as if holonation had the whole machine to itself (actually, holonation is one of four 'virtual' sites on a single computer server). It's amazing what going from $5/month to $20/month can buy you.

What this all means for you is that response time should be quicker, and we won't have glitches that are the fault of the hosting provider. Instead, from here on out, all problems with the site are on me!

One thing you might notice right now is that "Our Latest Experiences" and "interactions" are empty, and recipe photos are not displaying. I need to revamp how the site handles these features (and pretty much everything else!).

The good and bad news is that I've very busy this year working on my OneManIncubator consulting business. I have one client for whom I've been doing website development. 90% of the code I've developed on that project started with the holonation code-base, and will be directly useable on holonation.

I'm looking forward to having a solid week or two to work on totally revamping the holonation site from top to bottom. The content on the site is amazing thanks to all of you. It's the codebase and site organization that needs an extreme makeover. 

Oh well, hopefully soon. Thanks for your patience with this site migration.

Comments (0)

Sorry About the Saving Bug

by  peter @  December 12, 2007 20:02 

After four weeks of quiet on the site, I just posted a question. As I mention in that question, i was recently in Greece for 2 weeks.

Well, soon as as I clicked "Save and Preview" on my question, I got a bug. Couldn't save it. So I went and fixed that bug and a couple of others related to saving content. Then I did save and post my question. 

I don't know if anybody else tried entering recipes, testimonies, or questions the past four weeks and came across this bug. if so, sorry!

What's going on is that I'm in the process of reorganizing the code of the site so that it can be re-used for other sites. I'm starting a consulting business in which I'll serve as a "one man incubator" of web businesses. That is, I can develop the business model, design the products/services, prototype them on a wesbite, and even handle the intellectual property end of things.

Anyway, in this work, some bugs have crept in. On my plate is setting up an automated system for finding these bugs (Ruby on Rails is really helpful here). Formerly, my sister, drLove, served as the "canary in a coal mine" for the site bugs. But it's high time I did this job properly.

Anyway, notwithstanding my emerging consulting business, Holonation remains my personal passion. It's what I'll do for free. I love what the site is about. I guess I should since I built it.

Of course, given that participation in the site is so light (even when there aren't bugs of death), I'm all ears on how to improve the site to make it more useable.

Sorry again. Hopefully, these sorts of bugs will soon be a thing of the past as far as you are concerned.

Comments (2)

Responding

by  peter @  October 06, 2007 17:16 

Four months ago, at the start of Summer, I reorganized the site so that the main navigation tabs read: Conditions, Experiences, and Organizers. I explained that reorganization in a blog posting.

On the heels of that reorganization, I got to rethinking our former features called "Testify" and "Answer". Orginally, when I started up this site, my primary focus was the Recipes. Basically, the Recipes are like a special kind of community blog.

Members of Holonation post the various Recipes just as with a community blog. But what makes Recipes different from a standard community blog is they follow a certain structure. Specifically, they ask for Introduction, Ingredients, and Steps.

The purpose of this structure is to encourage people to contribute punchy "single-card" recipes for doing something specific. Just as with recipes for food dishes, the Recipes on Holonation allow any of us to try them out for ourselves.

But given that many Recipes on Holonation are founded upon deep theory, and/or rich personal experience, a vehicle was needed for expressing these deeper notions.

Thus was born Testimonies. The original idea behind Testimonies was that they would serve as containers for deeper thoughts about Recipes.

Soon after, we realized that few in the demographic of the Holonation members just wakes up one day itching to share a personal Testimony with the web, and even fewer of us think of our lives in terms of Recipes for doing the things we do. But just about all of us have questions from time to time.

Thus the Questions feature was born. And with Questions came Answers.

But when I organized the site as mentioned above, it occured to me that one of the principal ways that any of us gets the idea to share a personal experience of ours is through reading the experiences of others.

That is, when we read a particular Recipe, Testimony, or Question, what often comes to mind are related experiences of our own.

So that's why I added the "Respond" feature. On every page dedicated to a single Recipe, Testimony, or Question, there is a link below the content inviting you to Respond with an experience of yours.

This link allows you to post the Recipe, Testimony, or Question that came to mind upon reading that content. Hope you find it useful.

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Our First "Organic" Member

by  peter @  October 06, 2007 15:40 

A week ago, member haiku joined the Holonation. This was a significant event not just because of the fascinating experiences she has shared with us. But also because she is, I believe, the first member who is a not a direct "six degrees of separation" contact of mine.

That is, I (peter) was the first person to sign up as a Holonation member (not surprising since I built the site). My sister, drLove,  was the second.

Then, as far as I can tell, every person who joined Holonation since is a friend or relative, or a friend of a friend, or, etc., of myself and/or drLove.

That is, until haiku joined last week. I think haiku found Holonation through searching for information on the Enneagram, stumbled onto my unfinished book on that subject,  then worked her way back to my personal website, and came here either via the Holonation link on my homepage or the one on my blog.

One of the very first things haiku did after signing up as a Holonation member was post her fascinating Testimony At the Threshold of the Tao. To be specific, she signed up at 4:35pm and posted her Testimony at 4:56pm. As she explained in that Testimony, "I wrote and posted the following article at http://autumnhaiku.newvine.com only a week ago."

Stepping back, what does all this mean? One thing it means is that haiku, like all Holonation members, is a person with wisdom to share. Further, it means haiku is comfortable with the Internet as a medium for communicating her wisdom. So comfortable that she posted her piece on another site, then signed up to this site, and re-posted it as a Testimony. This is a person who is comfortable with the ways of the web.

I suspect that most of us current Holonation members are not so comfortable with these ways. In my own life, at my breakfast table, I regularly have conversations with my wife and mother-in-law dealing squarely with a topic germane to Holonation. My mother-in-law will ask a question, and my wife will say: "Post that question on Holonation!"

But you know, even though my wife knows that that would be a good idea, even she hasn't signed up as a member yet. As far as I know, she hasn't signed up as a contributing member for any sites on the Internet.

I think that stance typifies not only my wife and most Holonation members, but also most of us who are older than 30-something. We didn't grow up with the Internet -- emailing, chatting, blogging, podcasting, texting, etc. So to many of us in our 40s and beyond, the Internet seems strange.

Specifically, the Internet feels strange as a medium for self-expression. Email is just an extension of the letters we wrote as children; online shopping certainly tries to mimic mall shopping; even IM and chat have analogues in our telephone conversations from the 1970s.

But blogging? Podcasting? Wikis? Through these Internet media we share our thoughts, feelings, art, beliefs, and experiences with the whole wide world. Which among us in our 40s and beyond remembers doing anything even resembling that back when we were children?

And yet, at bottom, this is precisely what Holonation is. Holonation is a set of community blogs (Experiences) and a wiki (Conditions).

The current median age of all Holonation members is 46. That means that the typical Holonation member was going through puberty some time around Watergate. Those of us on the North side of that median remember the Sixties. We remember that time as one informed by a shared dream of youth. It was a dream of peace and community; of love and wisdom.

Today, if the television is our primary medium, it might seem that that shared dream is long dead. But it's not dead. Our children have revived it. They call it the Internet.

Sure, the Internet has more than its share of the venal, prurient, and profane. But at the same time, it is also filled with beauty, love, and wisdom. At bottom, the Internet is nothing more and nothing less than a mirror reflecting us people as we are.

But as of 2007, it mostly reflects our children. That is, sites the content of which arise from the site members are dominated by teens, 20s, and 30s.

Spend a few minutes on YouTube. Browse around. One thing you'll quickly notice is that a certain juvenile sentiment predominates.

But dig deeper on YouTube and you will find the most precious of jewels. You will find the sort of love that animates; the kind of wisdom that sparks curiosity; the type of beauty that brings tears to eyes.

Today, Holonation is a little island of unreality. Among our 23 members seems to be not a single juvenile flamer. Should the Holonation grow substantially, surely we will see some of that ilk. Even so, that will be an interesting time of a different sort.

But today, all we have in the Holonation is a collection of people who have lived long enough for wisdom to percolate. Which brings me back to haiku. Read her Testimony, At the Threshold of the Tao. I don't how old haiku is. But I read her Testimony and I say: "Children, rarely if ever, write such things."

This is what I say about pretty much all of the Experiences shared on Holonation. With only 23 members, we already have a tremendous store of wisdom on this site.

But I know there is much more within each of our heads and hearts, and in that of others like haiku who will stumble across this site.

These are the fun early days of Holonation. 

Comments (4)

Revamped Home Page

by  peter @  June 14, 2007 23:49 

Today I revamped the home page to reflect the new organization of the site. The three main categories of information on the site are:

1. Conditions
2. Experiences
3. Organization

Conditions is what we were calling the "Book" in earlier versions of the site. The idea of the book was always to draw from Recipes and Testimonies, to generate a collection of organized and useful pages for transforming mind and body. More thinking on this led us to re-envision this "Book of Wisdom" as a "Book of Conditions".

The reason for this shift is that present-day America tends to approach health from the point of view of conditions (aka symptoms) -- as opposed to causation, prevention, and healthy practices. So this site should reflect the mindset of present-day America -- at least as the site greets a new user.

Experiences are the guts of the site: Recipes, Testimonies, and Questions. All three kinds of content comprise the personal experiences of we Holonation members. 

These collective experiences reflect what is radical about this site. Most health sites that start with a condition like "cancer" or "autism" would go directlty to "expert" organizations like the Mayo Clinic, and/or to the pharmaceutical companies who offer "magic pills".

Of course, "natural health" sites don't cite the Mayo Clinic first or the phameceuticals either. But what those sites tend to do is reply upon the expertise of one or a few natural health practitioners.

Holonation "takes a left turn at Albuquerque" and relies instead upon the collective experience of the members. This collective experience produces the Wisdom of the Crowds effect.

Organizaton is the principal means through which that wisdom is "mined".  The three main organizational approaches on the site are Our Values, Tags, and Members. (Of course, Ratings also helps in this regard.)

"Our Values" is what we formerly called "categories", and more recently, "Mind & Body functions". This new name gets us closer to the heart of this site than did the previous names. For example, "Functions" like Love and Wisdom are not merely functions of the human mind, they are also how we value experiences like Recipes. But they are even more than that. They are our values.

At bottom, Our Values are simply a special case of tags. That is, they are those specific tags that reflect our values. But because they do, they are treated specially.

Finally, it may seem strange to call Members a "means of organization". Of course, we members of Holonation are the source of almost every item of information on the site. So the Members are obviously much more than merely one kind of organizing tool.

However, when we click on the page for a particular member, what we get is a particular slice through the content of the site (specifically, we are seeing the content authored by that member). This is quite analogous to visting the page of one of our values or of a tag.

Well, at the end of the day, I hope this new re-oganization helps improve the site's usefulness. 

Comments (2)

Update on Site Crashes

by  peter @  June 14, 2007 13:46 

As I mentioned in the first blog entry, the Holonation website suffers from periodic crashes. Crashes occur for very different reasons. The reasons include:

• "We're sorry ..." -- That one is a bug in my code that I need to fix. There's less and less of those over time.
• "Rails app has failed to start properly ... " (or something lke that), is an artifact of the site being hosted right now on a shared server -- the single road into the shared server get congested sometmes (think rush-hour traffic in a big city)
  
• The site won't load at all.

The first two kinds of crashes are fixable. With the first kind, i can just fix the bug once I know about it. With the second kind, clicking the "Refresh" button will usually fix the problem.

But the third problem is death for the site. That happens when the shared server that this site is on get so congested, it either outright crashes, or comes to a virtual standstill (which is functionally equivalent to a server crash) (think 20-car pileup, freeway as a parking lot, people out of their cars craning their necks for a better look).

This week, for some reason, this #3 "death" problem has arisen just about every morning. I mean, for 5 or 6 days now in a row, but only in the morning.

The only good thing about this that I can think of is that usage this week of the site has been very quiet. By the members at least. Of course, that is another form of death -- "death by apathy" in that case, as opposed to "death by crash".

At some point, I'll need to review my hosting decisions for this site. That point will come when usage of the site starts to ramp.

But of course, we might never reach that point if this "death by crashing" continues every morning. Such is life trying to get a fledgling website going.

Anyway, hopefully this entry helps clarify your frustrations if you bump into these.

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Tagging is live

by  peter @  June 11, 2007 19:47 

I just added the first cut at a tagging feature. You can now tag Recipes, Testimonies, and Questions. If you want to read about the theory of it, here is Wikipedia's page on tagging.

But it's a pretty simple notion to grasp. Have you ever used file folders to organize your papers? If so, did you ever put labels on those folders (e.g. "taxes 2007", "electrical bills", etc.)?

Those labels are what we call "tags" on the web. The difference between your paper file folders and web tagging is the following: Any specific paper document could be organized into only one folder at a time (and thus under only one label), but the same web document can be organized under multiple tags.

The web way is, of course, a much more natural way of organizing information since any piece of information can always be classified differently under different schema.

Moreover, on the web, when all members are assigning their own tags to the same set of content, multiple different classification schema emerge. Some will be popular shema; others less so.

But over time, as the content becomes thoroughly tagged, any person seeking any type of content should be able to find it through the tags.

If that's confusing, just play with the feature, and over time, you'll see what I mean.

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The Holonation Mind & Body Framework

by  peter @  May 17, 2007 00:00 

The tag-line for the site says it all: Holonation is about Transforming Mind & Body. Therefore, the framework for the site revolves around Mind and Body, and focuses on improving them toward peak condition. Improving the Mind means expanding it; improving the Body means optimizing it.

Mind 

Concerning the Mind, two major functions are feeling and thinking. In the precise language of neuroscience, this pair is known as emotion and cognition. Holonation aims to improve these two.

When feelings/emotions improve, Love expands. Love is the opposite of fear, egotism, and obsession. Similarly, when thinking/cognition improves, Wisdom expands. Wisdom is the opposite of lack of awareness.

Holonation seeks to identify those practices (Recipes), and the arguments and stories in support of these practices (Testimonies), that expand the functioning of our Minds.

Body

Concerning the Body, Holonation observes that the human body is a very unique machine. Like most any machine, the human body takes in inputs (Intake) and sends out outputs (Excretion). It performs work (Exercise) but must be allowed to cool from time to time (Rest). In order that this machine performs optimally, it is important that impurities not enter it (Avoidance), and that periodic maintenance be conducted on it (Hygiene).

However, what makes this human body a unique machine, are a conscious Mind and the remarkable power of self-healing.

Holonation seeks to identify those practices (Recipes), and the arguments and stories in support of these practices (Testimonies), that optimize the functioning of our Bodies.

Children 

Many of us have Children under our care. Since we are interested in transforming our own Minds and Bodies, it follows that we seek the same for our Children. Of course, much, if not most, of what the Holonation deems most helpful among the Mind and Body Recipes and Testimonies, will also be applicable to our Children.

Still, some of the content won't be applicable. And further, the amazing rapid development of Children from conception, to birth, and all the way through to full growth, creates unique demands for optimally nurturing their changing Minds and Bodies.

Holonation seeks ways to optimally nuture Love (Openness) and Wisdom (Curiosity) within our growing Children. In addition, it looks out for special challenges and demands of these growing Bodies (Growth).

Endings

Finally, even though we are doing the best we can do at any given time, there are many things in our lives that come to an end. This end of a cycle (Endings) comes to our Bodies (death), the Bodies of our loved ones, and sometimes to our marriages and core relationships (divorce or separation). Forty years ago, researchers Holmes and Rahe argued that:

• Death of a Spouse,
• Divorce,
• Marital Separation, and
• Death of a Close Family Member

are four of the top five most stressful experiences known to mankind. As such, these researchers showed that these events serve as reliable predictors of ensuing illness.

Mindful of this, Holonation provides a forum in which to assist in the prevention of stress-related illnesses, as well as to give support to those for whom the end is near. Holonation seeks ways to come to resolutions with Love (Letting Go) and resolutions with Wisdom (Order).

These special cases of Love and Wisdom are highlighted because of the unique approach to them.  Love and Wisdom on this site are about expanding and optimizing vitality. Openness (Love) and Curiosity (Wisdom) are about nurturing an accelerated vitality (Children). Letting Go  (Love) and Order (Wisdom) concern resolving the inevitable end of vitality (Endings).  

Conclusion

That, in a nutshell, is what Holonation is all about.

Comments (2)

The Meaning of 'Holonation'

by  peter @  May 15, 2007 00:00 

'Holonation' has two meanings: (1) the state of being a holon; and (2) a nation of holons.

What is a 'holon'? Wikipedia offers a nice definition:

A holon is a system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. It can be conceived as systems nested within each other. Every system can be considered a holon, from a subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. ... Since a holon is embedded in larger wholes, it is influenced by and influences these larger wholes. And since a holon also contains subsystems, or parts, it is similarly influenced by and influences these parts. Information flows bidirectionally between smaller and larger systems.

holonation.com is nourished by a nation of members interested in transforming our minds and bodies toward peak condition. This nation of members is a holon; so is each member; and so is the mind and body of each member. This framework dovetails nicely with the essence of this website.

This essence is revealed in the answer to the following question: Who is the expert on how to transform mind & body? Within the Holonation, each member is his or her own expert on this question. But at the same time, the Holonation as a whole is an expert with collective wisdom that serves each member.

The first kind of expertise -- self-expertise -- acknowledges that no one can ever know us -- the thoughts of our minds and the feelings of our bodies -- as well as we can know ourselves. All it takes is self awareness.

The second kind of expertise arises from the Wisdom of the Crowds phenomenon. This phenomenon holds that, sometimes, all of us together can do a better job than can any one of us individually.

Together, the expert holon that is you, and the expert holon that is all of us, make up this loving and wise Holonation.

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