May 9, 2000

Subject: Compilation of the responses received from the other Focus Group members to the poll prepared by the Focus Group facilitator to determine the Selection Criteria

Dear Focus Group friends

First I want to thank you all very much for your continuous participation and replies to these suggested Selection Criteria. I particularly appreciated Ricardo's lenghty comments and that's why I've decided to use his comments and responses to my poll as the basis for this compilation of all your responses -- except Maggie who did not participate despite the 4 additional days left for her input. This whole following document and your further comments and replies to this second draft of our Selection Criteria will eventually be available as a link from the Selection Criteria to be posted once properly adopted on our Focus Group Webpage.

One detail about this webpage: I mentioned in an earlier email that I was considering installing this webpage and all its future archives on another free website at iquebec.com instead of mine at cybernaute.com -- but after carefully reviewing some other existing webpages there, I realized that it would not be appropriate at all to place our webpage there or into any other free website on the Net because of the continuous and very much so in-your-face advertizement these sites impose into every webpage posted there. And in addition the server was extremely slow in putting up the pages once I clicked to get them up. The ideal solution for me/us would be to either pay for a reserved domain name ($200 US I think for the first 2 years) such as www.focusgroup.com and for me to pay x dollars a month to cybernaute.com to host this website -- OR to just pay x dollars a month to have additional hard disk space at cybernaute.com to host our webpage under www.cybernaute.com/FGW instead of the current www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000/FocusGroupWebpage.htm and that second option is what I'll soon implement if you all agree with this... and I'll cover the cost.
This would also give me the possibility to have a new second different email address than globalvisionary@cybernaute.com and it would probably be something like focusgroup@cybernaute.com

So I'll wait for your comments -- if any -- on this.

Now let's review the compilation of responses look for MY COMMENT in caps:

Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000
From: Ricardo Ocampo <anahuak@webtelmex.net.mx>
Subject: FOCUS GROUP / Re: Final review of Meditation Focus #1 and 8 important
questions for your attention please

Greetings from Mexico City, dear friends!

Jean, you wrote: "As I suggested also yesterday as a selection criterion,
the issue should have been already in the news media around the world in
some way recently so people at the receiving end can immediately see that
this is indeed an urgent issue".

Our experience, dearest brother, tell us latinamerican issues are not
regularly exposed, and almost never well exposed, in full perspectives, in
world mainstream media. I suggest we should be more flexible on this
subject.

MY COMMENT: It is absolutely true that most TV media reports and newspapers are never covering all aspects related to any crisis situation - except in longer 30 minutes TV coverage - and that often their depiction of the situation is heavily influenced by a whole set of ingrained and almost invisible Western bias and what may relate more specifically to the national policies and economic interests of their own country - if and when they decide to cover an issue at all!

But when I stated that "the issue should have been already in the news media around the world is
some way recently" I must say that I have a pretty unique vantage point here as I can get on my satellite dish TV reports from a much wider variety of sources than most other locations on Earth.
In addition to the BBC international news coverage which is much more extensive and thorough than most other US media, I get all the main US channels, including CNN (but the US sources are often the less reliable ones because their coverage is so often shallow and heavily biased by intern editorial pressures and self-censorship by the journalists themselves). I also get all the English and French Canadian News reports on TV, and I want to highlight here that our CBC (Radio-Canada) television network in Quebec is often doing a very good job, especially in special 60 minutes news programs, at digging out the facts and presenting a more factual coverage of events, not always and on all issue all the time, but it's higher than average. Then in addition to 2 other round-the-clock TV news channels here in Quebec, I also get the main TV news bulletins from France and from various French territories around the world. And that's only what comes through TV. There are other more in-depth news coverage on French radio and I've been receiving and reading Time magazine for the last 20 years and I receive a number of other excellent print magazines and publications on various subjects. And then there is then cornucopia of information we can find on website and finally a little army of people on the ERN list pointing my attention from time to time through their emails on all kinds of hard to get info on all kinds of issues.

So what it all comes down if that, being a news glutton as I am, I'm very much aware of what is being covered in the media and these numerous sources all add up to helping me figure out what are the most pressing issues we might want to consider. Yet, my suggestion of that first criteria had another important aspect to it :"the issue should have been already in the news media around the world in some way recently so people at the receiving end can immediately see that
this is indeed an urgent issue" - the fact that media around the world are covering extensively a developing situation over the course of many days, weeks and months - think of the war in Kosovo for instance - means that people receiving our suggested foci will likely have already been exposed to at least some information about what is going on and will spontaneously recognize that it is indeed a legitimate concern and deserving of such global attention from meditating people.

Yet news media coverage is no guarantee that people will know about an issue because so many people nowadays simply don't watch or read the news and there is no guarantee either that some obscure unreported and long simmering conflict -- there are still about 40 ongoing armed conflicts at various stages of development around the world. How often do you hear about all of them in the news? -- have indeed be reported in the newsmedia. And even if some exposure has been given to an issue, it is almost always sure that it has been only partial and incomplete as to all aspects that we should know about.

So it is obvious that this first criteria, and all other ones for that matter, have to be used very flexibly as a set of general guidelines giving us some kind of benchmark references on which to base a decision when it is not immediately obvious that a proposed issue can be regarded as worthy to be selected. Therefore I would like to submit the following preamble to these criteria (to be also posted on our webpage):

"The following Selection Criteria have been chosen to help the Focus Group select the best and most pressing issue(s) each week for global consideration. They are only a set of general and flexible guidelines and each proposal submitted for selection to the Focus Group will be reviewed and evaluated on its own merit."

I would like also to add that I do not envision the selection of issues every week to become a purely analytical business, coldly setting an issue against a dry set of criteria to see if it narrowly meets the conditions set for its approval. That could open the way for endless discussions and pit opinions against opinions in a futile attempt to reach an every elusive "perfect consensus". It is clear to me that the more the Focus Group members will strive to develop a group mind in synch with whatever guidance Spirit is continuously providing each of us every second of our embodiment -- if we can just remember to open our minds and hearts to it -- there more easily the appropriate focus of foci to recommend will emerge each week from our midst and will be spontaneously recognized as such by the other Focus Group members and the worldwide community of people who are aligned to their own inner guidance. In this regard, the proposed synchronized meditation and joining or hearts and minds every second and fourth Saturdays of each month as proposed by Helen (she proposed at 7 am UK time - which is 2 am here East Coast time but since I doubt Kalama and Ricardo could manage such a late time in the night, I would rather suggest 7 pm UK time - which would be 8 pm in Europe, probably 9 or 10 pm in Cyprus, 2 pm Eastern Standard Time here and 8 am in Hawaii -- and 2 am on Sundays for you Helen can *you* manage such a late hour?) for the 7 Focus Group members and all the other people gravitating around this central node could further assist in nurturing and anchoring in us this necessary group consciousness and thus enable us to more easily work from our emerging group self than from our individual and separated selves when collaborating on manifesting the foci for this global healing work. If we all agree as we all seemed to do, then our next rendez-vous point *ONLY* for the 7 of us and those interested in the reserve team and assistants, would be next Saturday 13.

Could you please each confirm if you will be committing to be part of it and would you agree Helen to remind us all by email the day before each second and last Saturdays to be there all together?

(END OF COMMENT)

I am afraid we're going to have to make translation work into
english too, towards some specific proposed issues on our region. No prob.
I have several volunteering translators already interested in our beautiful
project. On the Amazon Rain Forest the research is easy, for example, but
in the Columbia crisis I don't think it's going to be available the whole
picture in any source. We'll see. We're working on it already. That's why I
wanted to ask the group if everybody have enough info on this horrendous
war and what kind and quality of info we have. To know it will be very
interesting and also very useful for my criteria on how are things on this
topic of well-spreaded and good information accessible on this kind of
subjects around the world. The Columbia issue is not only the government
corruption crisis, the drug lords or the guerrilla atrocities. It's also
about a whole menu of international interest in the zone and a whole
country and people suffering incredible collective pain, death, massacres,
famine, stress, hostigation (Note from Jean: he probably meant "hostage taking")
and extreme violence.

The idea of a list of alternative information sources was great, as Leigh
proposed. Let's put all together our data in this field, if that's sounds
ok with everybody.

MY COMMENT: Regarding "alternative information sources", although it is a good idea to have such a list of URLs, I think I would personally never use it because it is so time-consuming to search vast websites for the bits of alternative info we might need or want to include as a reference - it is like searching a needle in a haystack. Of course, if such sites have their own in-house search engine, then it is different. But really I prefer to use good search engines such as google.com to zoom in on the best sources usually in places I would never have known to exist at all. And let us remember that we never want to burden people with too many facts in our summary statements synthesizing the essential there is to know to properly grasp the general outlines of an issue suggested as a meditation focus. Yes, it is useful for those very few people who will want to further research the issues to see immediately where they can find more relevant and hard-to-find information. Yet I think the vast majority of people receiving our foci will be content to review only our short (2 or 3 paragraphs) summary statement and will focus on the positive visions or outcomes we will recommend instead on delving on all the sometimes gory details of the problems faced by some of our brothers and sisters.

(END OF COMMENT)

Another thing. On the title of the first focus I was confused with the date
you include: april 28. That's the date of the posting, the calling to be
approved, I know, but maybe is better to include in that space the global
meditation precise date. For example, why don't we state the sunday's date
better: in this first case april 30?

MY COMMENT: As you may have noticed in the last focus material I prepared, I wrote (Web Posted May 5, 2000). We don't want to indicate any single day date for the meditation itself since the duration of each focus is a whole week. However, what we might want to do is to add the following after the subject title of each email: for instance: Meditation Focus #2 (Web Posted May 12, 2000 - For the week of May 7 at noon to May 14 at noon)

(END OF COMMENT)