New Bodhicharya Communities Website

We would like to invite all Bodhicharya students and friends to join our new Bodhicharya community website.

This project has been developed over the past weeks with the support, and sponsorship, of the Dutch IT company InTouch. It was then put to the test at this years Summer Camp in France. As a result of that experiment, Ringu Tulku Rinpoche wished us to make it widely available to all Bodhicharya groups, students and friends.

To become a member and start your own community, just visit http://bodhicharya.intouch.net and click on the Sign Up Now text in the top right corner of the page.

In a nutshell, it’s a network which can contain a limitless amount of individual communities, enabling Rinpoche’s students to communicate, work together and share things much as they are already doing on facebook. It’s like a private Facebook, in a way. Except its just used for Bodhicharya things, there’s no ads, junk messages and its much more powerful. You can actually work together on projects/tasks/events within it. This can be done in a public or private way. So instead of endless cc’ed group emails that get longer and longer, you just make a community and write your message once in there. That message will then appear on the “wall” of all those who are members of that community.

The system works similar to Facebook and Twitter where you choose what and who you wish to follow or see on your “wall” (“My Page” is effectively your wall). Therefore, the content you see on your “My Page” will be different to what others see. It all depends on what, and who, you have decided to follow.  This is key. If you don’t join or follow people or communities, then you won’t see much. If you have an idea for a community, just create one! It can be public or private.

We hope that this flexibility will allow communities to be created around different activities, locations and languages. For example, lots of study groups are popping up around the Online Shedra. This will allow those groups to make individual communities so that they can communicate (in their own language) around the Shedra material.

This is very much an experiment, for everyone. Like Facebook, it is intuitive. There’s no manual and no support. We just have to experiment and help each other. The best thing to do is just to start using it. It’s like dancing. You just do it.

To join in, just visit http://bodhicharya.intouch.net and “sign up now”. You can’t login with your existing Bodhicharya website details as this is a separate system. But you can use those details again to sign up with so that they match your existing name and password. Please note, there is currently a mistake on the Bodhicharya Communities login page. It currently asks you for your name to login, but it actually needs your email address here instead.

This will then bring you into the main Network page. From there you can view your own page, see other members and follow them and see the current communities that have been created. You can also invite other Bodhicharians to join in too.

So, come on in! There’s lots of nice images from the summer camp to see already.