Community Guidelines

Revoluminaries,

A few days ago we wrote about the principles that inspire us. Along with those principles, we have been doing a lot of thinking here about what guidelines we should try to maintain to ensure that everyone has a positive experience as part of the community.

We’ve started formulating our ideas, and I welcome your comments and feedback on how you would like the community to operate. After all, you are Revoluminary!

Community Guidelines

1. We encourage everyone to welcome new members the way you would like to be welcomed if you were new to the community, and to be as inclusive as possible.
2. We are inspired by ideas and we live by words. We actively encourage open and vigorous debate in the pursuit of understanding. However, we do not allow obscene, racist, sexually explicit or otherwise offensive content.
3. We believe in the power of learning to inspire people to achieve and to understand. However members of our community may not suggest or encourage violent, illegal, illicit or otherwise inappropriate activity.
4. We value intellectual property protections and ask that members have copyright ownership of all material shared on the Revoluminary platform.
5. We respect the privacy of our community members, and ask that members refrain from sharing phone numbers, addresses, Social Security numbers, or other private information.
6. Use good judgment, and have a wonderful time!

What we stand for

Fellow Revoluminaries,

As we prepare to launch our community, we wanted to take a few minutes to share the values that we believe are fundamental to what being a Revoluminary is all about.

We enthusiastically welcome your comments and thoughts on these. After all, you are Revoluminary, and we want to make sure that we build the best site community for all of us.

Our Principles:

• We believe ideas can inspire and change the world
• We believe everyone should be free to choose what, when and how they learn
• We believe knowledge is meant to be shared
• We believe people are essentially good
• We believe honest, open exchange brings out the best in people and in communities
• We believe in respecting everyone as a unique individual with valuable thoughts, ideas, beliefs and inspirations
• We believe we have a lot to learn and we are excited to get started!

Say you want a Revoluminary

It’s been a few weeks since we announced that we’d entered Alpha testing. Since that time we have been in the lab mixing chemicals, exploding monitors, and otherwise testing the alchemy behind the Revoluminary site.

While we’ve been working, we’ve received several questions about how the site will work, and I thought I’d go ahead and share some answers.

Q: Who can use Revoluminary?
A: Revoluminary is intended for everyone. For the launch we have invited a limited number of people to participate in the private beta (you can request an invitation here). Shortly after launch we will be extending those invitations.

Q: What subjects can I teach on Revoluminary?
A: At Revoluminary we encourage people to share their knowledge with the world. We already have instructors in over 14 languages, math, science, as well as in a lot of really fun things like high alpine mountaineering, marathon training, and cooking! However, in the interest of protecting our users, we do not allow obscene, racist, sexually explicit or otherwise offensive topics.

Q: Do I need Skype to use Revoluminary?
A: No. Revoluminary uses a proprietary browser based classroom that combines streaming video and voice, whiteboarding, instant messaging and powerpoint and word file exchange in one convenient place. The Revoluminary classroom works on Safari, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox platforms.

Q: So how does Revoluminary work?
A: Revoluminary provides a convenient and easy interface for people from around the world to meet and teach each other. As a member of the Revoluminary community, you can create a personal profile, list classes you are available to teach, manage your schedule, send messages to other members, and of course, teach or learn from anyone in the world through the Revoluminary classroom.

Q: How much does it cost?
A: You decide! Every instructor sets their own rate, and joining Revoluminary is free.

Q: When will you launch?
A: We plan on launching in a few weeks!

Q: Do you still need to learn Italian to impress a certain girl?
A: You have no idea! I think she’s starting to figure out that the only thing I really know how to say is “diami un bacio”...but she still occasionally says ‘si’

Hope these answered a few of the questions you all have sent our way. And watch this space, we’ll be posting a lot more information over the next couple weeks!