My Role in the Gaia community

Christopher Galtenberg, Site and Technical Lead

After the brilliant tenures of Aaron and Jake, I am the "3rd steward" of this beautiful oasis on the web.  A Zaadzster from the end of 2006, I volunteered for the team in March of 07, and joined officially in October of that year.  Relocated to Denver, and now even closer to the office in Louisville -- in the middle of 2008 I was given charge of the technical side of the community, with a much smaller team, still committed to the ideas and ideals of Brian and now Siona. 

Zaadz started as a ruthlessly supportive and optimistic social network, dedicated to notions of conscious capitalism and personal expression.  Brian believed that a person's love was destined to bloom into a full enterprise -- hence one would walk the road of expression and discovery, leading to a manifestation in the material realm, where that soul would support and be supported through their very love. 

Brian's love was philosophy, and on Zaadz it was contagious.  You could read missives by 'Brian Johnson, Philosopher and CEO' -- and other strong souls took on the title of philosopher to match.  The quotes area filled with wisdom, blogs filled with big ideas, group discussions bantered here and fro on modern philosophies.  For me, a philosopher with an original work in progress, it was just about ideal.

Brian took his own personal philosophy to its logical conclusion, and moved on to found PhilosophersNotes, a site dedicated to the best ideas from the greatest books.  He sold Zaadz to Gaiam, who truly loved the idea of a conscious and optimistic community.  Siona took the reins as director of the community, and oversaw our brand transition to Gaia.  The conscious capitalism and philosophy edges came off, and Siona turned Gaia to what it already was, a blossoming of tens of thousands of wonderful, supportive, loving souls. 

I read of Zaadz first in a copy of What Is Enlightenment magazine.  I felt resonance right away, even before I understood what I was seeing -- and as you've read on my main profile page, I treat resonance as the highest form of 'clue'.  With that feeling, and my own technical abilities, it wasn't a surprise that I found my way onto the team.  What was a surprise was landing in this position, in charge of the technical show.   I figured I was here to rekindle the philosophy angle of Zaadz, in a more organic way on Gaia, and to help the site support itself with 'plus/pro' tools like these.  Now it seems that I'm here to use my design skills (which go back to my earliest computer days, building graphical applications on the original Mac at age 12) and learn to run a full server cluster, which is 100% of my every day now.

My job is to keep these engines running.  And also to bring the site up to modern standards.  We still have dozens of remnants of a time when the site was built literally in emergency mode.  Our new sidebar is one example of our reorganization, the new Groups section is another.  Profiles, signup, blogs, photos, gatherings, and all the rest will have their turn.  I work a lot with Jackson, and together I think we have the right eye to make this site's exterior match its gorgeous interior (which you built!).  Ryan and Franc are brilliant rails engineers -- I literally couldn't do it without them -- I wish I had three copies of each of those dudes :)

This year (2009) will see us transition to a new cluster, and will see the rest of the site transform into what you now see in the groups and homepage areas.  What time is left of the year may see the emergence some of what I sensed in my original encounter with Zaadz.  I have lost many of my early senses of what could come to be, and gained many new ones, learning hard knowledge sitting in this more central seat. 

I am a big believer in the natural flow of the Taoist Way, the Zen removal of ego and expectation, and the Wabi-Sabi belief in organic, structured unstructured growth.  So what that means is that Gaia will be Gaia and it will be Zaadz and it will not be anything that it wasn't ever supposed to become.  Seeing those manifestations become is worth showing up to this desk everyday.

Meet the rest of the brilliant Gaia Team...