The AUM 2008 Dana Cloud (Operation Raindrop)

Introduction
------------

(With reference to the file: AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-In_Detail-Final.pdf)

I call it my "Dana Cloud", a trope of the "Dharma Cloud" of Buddhism
(The Cloud of the Buddha's Teachings), hence the "Dana Cloud" of the
Buddha's activism. It is also referred to as "Operation Raindrop", as it
is a massed, parallel, micro-donation model - a dam is filled by
rainfall, one drop at a time.

From the perspective of Permaculture is can be considered "Integrity
Irrigation in the Governance Garden"

It is modelled on the "Fundamental Root Pragma" of "Act Or Assist".

If you have the skills, energy and time to assist directly with an
Active Conscience Organisation (ACO) then you can or you can assist
indirectly by financially supporting them, or you can do both.

Unless you are a polymath genius of boundless energy and efficiency,
there will be only a small finite number of ACO's that you can assist
directly with your personal skills, capabilities, time, familiarity and
experience, however the number of ACO's you can assist indirectly is
practically infinite.

The structure of this dana cloud is constrained, by the fact that I am
on Social Security and so of limited means. Saving money is difficult at
best, so what I aim to do, is an end of financial year donation
blitzkrieg, where I can get the annual $500 advance from Social Security
and then donate it, with some augmentation, to the Active Conscience
Organisations (ACO's) of my choice.

Massed, parallel, micro-donations, done on the same day, done and
dusted.

I then pay off the advance back to Social Security over the subsequent
six months, it is easier for me to pay back incrementally and
consistently than to accumulate savings reliably, in my circumstances,
at the financial margins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Akin to the Maslowian Hierarchy of Needs with the base of survival and
the acme of self-actualisation, there is a cognate Maslowian hierarchy
of finances and income from survival to the acme of pure
self-discretion, the more money you have the easier it is to donate,
given that you have more discretionary income to apportion between self
and selflessness, sensibly, beyond survival and maintenance and long
term planning.

The top layer of the Maslowian Hierarchy, the Self-Actualisation level,
is particularly apt, with its qualities of "morality, creativity,
spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice and acceptance of
facts..."

At my financial level, on social security, which is geared to survival
maintenance, I aim for about 5% of gross income. The greater the gross
income level the more that discretionary freedom is practical, for
incomes of $25,000 up to $100,000 per annum, in the spirit of "Spinal
Tap", "Up To Eleven" - 11% and for greater income levels, the sky is the
limit, at $1,000,000 per annum, 51% should be the absolute minimum to
demonstrate true executive competence, marshalling the amplified income.

The design of this dana cloud is also constrained by the absolute amount
available for donation and by the MMQ (Minimal Meaningful Quanta) of
donation, which I fixed at $5.00 AUD per ACO, in 2008, that constrains
the FFF (Fractal Fine Feathering) of the design - for instance, with a
budget of $500, then the maximum dimension of the Fractal Fine
Feathering design pattern would be 100. In the 2008 Dana Cloud, the FFF
dimension is 42.

As much as I'd like to (indirectly) specialise in "kicking heads" at the
big end of town and the bastardry therein, you also have to contemplate
and meditate taking the "capability elevator" (intellectual, physical,
educational, economic) of the myriad variants of human being from the
penthouse to ground-level and down, down to the underground basement
into the deep vulnerability of trailing edge consciousness and to take
appropriate correctives for each level, it is only courtesy, given your
innate or achieved stabilised capability.

One has to also bear in mind to see how sub-ordinate and otherwise
deeply vulnerable stratas of consciousness whether animal, plant or
inanimate suffer as well at the hands of humanity and it's egoic
ambitions.

The whole structure allows me some (only some) peace and relief of
conscience when meditating in retreat, along the lines of "Nero fiddling
while Rome burns" and "Wall Street blowing carbon bubbles while Home
burns."

The structure also provides some (only some) relief of conscience during
visionary research and exploration - in so far as they have the
potential, actualised or not, to be tools of human ethical and visionary
evolution - the structure providing some (only some) indication and
reassurance that I am not totally asleep at the wheel.

It's also some insurance and guarantee that no matter how far out things
might get in explorations, at least I've done my homework, to some
extent (only some). It also is my "Towards Mutual Comprehensibility"
(TMC) with the rest of the scene, regardless how arcane and esoteric my
research may become.

This dana cloud design is not perfect, by any means, but it will do for
2008 (FY2009). It's not an exemplar of design, by any stretch of the
imagination, but merely an example, this is important to note and to
bear the distinction between "exemplar" and "example" in mind.

What I am quite chuffed about is the fact that this is the first
mind-map and the first spreadsheet that I've ever done, admittedly I'm
behind the times and have lived a very sheltered life.

Practicalities
--------------

Two essential resources to establish a smooth orderly process are a
debit Visa or a debit MasterCard and associated bank account and also a
"PayPal" account.

A debit Visa or debit MasterCard has no credit facility and directly
draws funds from the associated bank account - there should be
absolutely no impediment to obtaining one, if you can open a bank
account, you can obtain a debit card.

Internet banking facilities should also be set up with the relevant
bank.

Dedicate the bank account and the associated debit Visa or MasterCard
for donations only, nothing else, the only transactions should be
deposits of funds into the card account and donations to organisations -
this ensures that any reports generated from the account are
uncomplicated by irrelevant, extraneous, transactions.

http://www.paypal.com.au

http://www.mastercard.com/au/personal/en/audebit/debit_info.html

http://www.visa-asia.com/ap/au/cardholders/cardsservices/visa_debit.shtml

Secondly, create a dedicated PayPal account for donations as well,
linked to the donations debit Visa or MasterCard - the only transactions
in the PayPal account should be donations - again that ensures clear and
simple reporting.

These are dedicated donations PayPal and debit card resources.

If you want similar resources for every day transactions, then open a
different bank account, a different debit card and a different PayPal
account all dedicated to every-day transactions, exclusive of any
donations.

For each PayPal account you will need a unique email address, here are
some recommended resources:

http://www.fastmail.fm	http://www.pobox.com	http://lavabit.com/

http://www.gmx.com	http://mail.google.com/

All provide webmail access and also provide POP and IMAP access for your
local email client on your computer as well.

PayPal accounts have two modes of transactions, directly via the debit
card, or directly via the associated bank account. Generally the former
provides more information, for easy confirmation and cross-correlation
of transaction records, and is to be recommended, whereas the latter is
substantially more uninformative in your bank account's transaction
records - particularly in the instance where you transact multiple
donations for the same amount on the same day.

Regarding the Spreadsheets
--------------------------

There are two identical spreadsheets:

This is the version for the Microsoft office Excel spreadsheet program:

AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.xls

This is the version for OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet program:

AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.ods

The open source freeware OpenOffice.org Office Suite can be downloaded
from: http://www.openoffice.org/

As you will discover, the spreadsheets are quite simple, the only
complicated formulae are in the Column "K" which calculates the number
of days between the day of the donation transaction, and the day of
confirmation/reconciliation of the transaction in the bank account. The
respective example formulae are:

Microsoft Office Excel: "=DATEDIF(B3,I3,"yd")"

OpenOffice.org Calc: "=DAYS(I3;B3)"

If constructing your own spreadsheet, then the row indexes would be
adjusted accordingly in the column "K".

FreeMind Mind-Mapper Installation Notes

Regarding the mind-map file: AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Final.mm

That is a "mind map" in the format of FreeMind, which is an open-source
Java framework based, mind-mapping application that is cross-platform.
It can run on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X and the GNU/Linux
operating systems, on personal computers, and so is a good collaborative
and data-sharing tool. It can also run on other platforms, but
installation is by "hand-rolling".

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

The stable version is v0.8.1 and the latest version is v0.9.0 RC4, the
latest version is quite stable and is the recommended one to download:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/files/freemind-unstable/

For general information on the mind-mapping concept:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

Many of the commercial mind-mapping applications are excellent as well,
such as Co-Co Systems VisiMap, Gael MindGenius and Mindjet MindManager,
to name but a few, check the citations on the Wikipedia page, it's a
matter of finding one that you like. Note however that the mind-map file
formats tend not to be interoperable, however, there are usually import
and export facilities from word document formats.

Please note that FreeMind, being a Java framework application, can be
sensitive on Microsoft Windows Operating Systems, in particular, with
the windows font-smoothing technology "ClearType" and may refuse to run
at all. Disabling ClearType easily tests this:

Start -> Settings -> Display -> Appearance -> Effects

And then seeing as a consequence, if FreeMind then runs properly. If you
have any such difficulties running FreeMind (or any Java application for
that matter) on a Microsoft Windows Operating System, such as Windows
XP, Vista or the new Windows 7, then in the first instance, download the
"ClearType" PowerToy, install it, and then readjust, or tune, your
ClearType:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

This is a technical explanation of the problem:

http://www.x-setup.net/forum/showthread.php?p=6856

Documentation Resources
-----------------------

These README notes, that you are reading are from the full zip archive
file. "AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Final-DateCode-20111029.zip"

Which can be downloaded from:

http://qiq-ec2c.net

The archive contents include this README file in Adobe Acrobat PDF and
plain text formats, and two spreadsheet files and one annotated mindmap:

AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.xls - Microsoft Office Excel
AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.ods - OpenOffice.org Calc
AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Final.mm      - Freemind Mindmapper

Printable PDF documentation:

AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.pdf (1pp)
AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Summary-Final.pdf (1pp)
AUM-2008-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-In_Detail-Final.pdf (55pp)