From a little spark may burst a flame

Launching a website is a fairly stressful process. It represents the culmination of months of work, of vision, of hope, of work, and of planning. As you near the end you see results of the efforts of many. The vision of the founder who had the concept. The talent of the designer who came up with the colors, the logo, the layout. The skill of the developers who built the technology to enable something radically new and different and who had the patience to constantly chase down bugs on the site. The friends who support the site and the team with constant affirmation.
And then there is our loyal user base who visit the site, offer courses, provide ideas and tell their friends and bring on students to the site.

Launching a new venture is an exhausting, humbling, terrifying, and exhilarating moment.

This week I met new members to our community from around the world. I traded emails from an English instructor who lives in Cairo, a PhD student in India, a French teacher in Frejus, and many others. They are all passionate about helping others to learn. And that's pretty exciting.

I've spent the week juggling the business, but in my spare time I've had some time to start reading Bill Bryson's "A short history of nearly everything". It's a fantastic book that traces the history behind the scientific discoveries that have shaped the modern world.

As I read through the pages, one thing becomes clear: Great ideas start small. They start as a gathering of a few people inspired by an idea and committed to making that idea a reality. It is in that spirit that I thought I'd share with all of you a snapshot of the Revoluminary traffic. I hope that we continue to grow and spread our enthusiasm for sharing knowledge.

Thanks to all who have joined and are offering to share what they know with the world. You are Revoluminary, and that's really something tremendous. So to my fellow Revoluminaries, don't stop! Tell your friends, reach out to your communities. Together we will change the world.

More Sneak Previews...Classroom and My Revoluminary

All,

Two of the features that we’re really excited about at Revoluminary are our proprietary classroom and the account manager. These two tools are intended to make teaching and learning online easier and more effective for our community members.

The Revoluminary classroom includes interactive voice, video, instant messaging, whiteboarding, and file exchange. Best of all, you can use the classroom through any standard browser (Mozilla, Firefox, and IE), with no peering. And because you have a dedicated connection, the call won’t be dropped.

My Revoluminary

The My Revoluminary page is your personal portal to everything going on Revoluminary. This is the place to go to update your profile, add or edit new classes, checkout your schedule, check your messages, or change your user account settings.

We think it's pretty cool and will help you manage your classes easier.

Sneak preview

Fellow Revoluminaries,

We're a week or so away from launching and I wanted to give you a sneak preview of the home page. We've just finished the initial user testing of the site, and we're pretty excited about the response to our style. As for me, I recently attended the new Italian cinema film festival here in San Francisco, and am pretty fired up to learn Italian (The woman came with me to the film festival...hey, I'm doing the best I can!).

So here's the site that you'll be seeing soon:

Revoluminary Home Page

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!

What it takes to be Revoluminary: Equipment Overview

Another late night here on the Revoluminary team. Good things, but lots of activity. Thanks again to those who've expressed interest in participating in our approaching beta. We've received a ton of interest from a lot of Revoluminaries, which is truly exciting. Testing is going well, the site is coming together which is really an exciting process to be a part of.

Several of you have asked about what the technical requirements of the site will be, and what they'll need to have in order to participate in the community. The short answer is that just about about anybody can join. The longer answer is that you'll need:

• Computer with a broadband connection
• The most recent version of flash (you can update for free at http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash)
• A video camera and microphone

That's really about it. Obviously you can cruise through the Revoluminary community site even if you haven't picked up some of the above, but to get the most out of the virtual classroom, you'll need the updated flash version and the video camera.

So if you haven't gotten those, go pick'em up. They're pretty cool, and soon will be a lot cooler!

Alpha testing begins!

Yet another late night, but a good one here at Revoluminary. Since I know a lot of you have been asking, thought I'd let you know about our progress and that we'd reached another milestone. We've started testing out the site.

I have to say, it's pretty cool! It's pretty exciting to see and feel and play around with something that until recently has been more of a goal than a reality. Starting a business and building a site are exercises in impatience. But occasionally you get to come up for air and look around at the team and see just what's been accomplished. And we're pretty jazzed.

Of course, it took only a few hours before we began brainstorming and coming up with new things that we'd love to add, but first things first.

We continue to get applications for the beta, which is equally exciting, and we're approaching the cutoff for how many we'll need to really get the site off the ground and running. So thanks to all for the enthusiasm. We look forward to showing it all to you once its done!

On the origin of speech (with apologies to Mr. Darwin)

It has been a busy week for us here at Revoluminary, filled with efforts to continue building out the site, activity within the team, meetings with advisers and investors, and emails with our growing community of beta testers (thanks to you all, we're working as fast as we can!). In my spare few moments, I've even gotten in some interesting reading.

As we work on this project, it's been pretty incredible the enthusiasm that we see. Not merely about Revoluminary, but also about the opportunity to learn and share knowledge. It's great seeing how excited people are about everything from physics to French, literature to travel. And whatever the interest, it seems that once excited about something, we want every one else to understand and share our enthusiasm!

In the midst of all these discussions, I was reminded by a teammate here about simple joys of discovery. A former teacher, he has just returned from a cross-country trip, and shared a forgotten piece of linguistic history. It seems (as several of you were probably already aware) that the English word "travel" is derived from the French verb "travailen" which later came to be understood as "to take a journey". The original definition of that word, he tells me, was "to toil" or "to labor" reflecting a time when even a short trip took such money, effort and risk that it was considered an economic labor.

We went on to discuss a book I had recently finished on the history of mathematics. Yes, it's true. But honestly, it was incredibly interesting, and offered some great background on the subject. An interesting example: While I was aware that we used the Arabic numbering system (1,2,3) rather than the ever-so-practical roman numeral system, I can honestly say I'd never given mathematic formulas that much thought. Thankfully, a 9th century Baghdad mathematician named Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi did give it some thought. A lot of thought. In fact he wrote a book about it, referring to his mathematical principles as "al jebr" or "a reunion of broken parts". His concepts proved such a success, that in the West they became known as the book of al jebr. Or as we now know it: Algebra.

Beyond mere trivia, the collision of linguistics and history and math and language in so casual a discussion reminded us both that knowledge is not geographically limited. Nor is it constrained by the fields and labels which we ascribe. It is, more often than even I realize, a fascinating tapestry reflecting many cultures, ideas, and relationships.

It is in that spirit that we are working to build Revoluminary, with the conviction that each of us has some knowledge to share and some things we'd love to learn. And apparently a lot of you agree, as the response to our upcoming beta testing has been great! We've now sent invitations to join the beta site in a few weeks to people living around the world and teaching all manner of topics. Which reminds me, our community of beta testers has been joined by several Italian instructors..!

A new way of knowing

18 months ago at 2am I finally gave up trying to find an Italian tutor. I wanted to learn the language, largely to impress a certain girl who spoke Italian. But I was only available late at night, and even then my schedule was sporadic. It seemed Italian was out, and I would have to rely on my charm. Italian would have been better...

That night sparked a year and a half long quest to understand why we learn the way we do (or don't). Why do the academies have a monopoly on knowledge? What happened to the lifelong student, the amateur scholar, and societies dedicated to shared interests, vigorous debate, and continuous discovery? Are people less excited about learning, or is it simply that we're less excited about the way we're taught? And most importantly, why can't technology help me find someone online that can teach Italian at midnight, or offer up some helpful tips for relating to a certain pretty Italian speaking girl? And for that matter, why can't I study art history? or cooking? or marathon training (a personal goal of mine)? People do these things all the time...surely somebody must be willing to teach them to the rest of us!

This month we're getting ready to launch a web site called Revoluminary (www.revoluminary.com) that I hope will address these questions and radically change the way that we share knowledge.

Revoluminary provides an easy and effective platform for people to explore, create, teach, and learn according to their own interests and abilities, while participating in a broader global community of friends and fellow enthusiasts. I hope it becomes a global knowledge potluck, where we can come together and learn from each other.

Many of you have already signed up to participate in our beta testing. If you haven't, I'd love to have you join us. We're running out of spaces, but as of this writing there were a little over 220 invitations to the beta left. In the meantime, watch this space, and please, share your thoughts. After all, we're building the site for you, the passionate learners and teachers of the world.

You may not have realized it, but YOU are Revoluminary!