The AUM 2009 Dana Cloud (Operation Raindrop) - Final

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

(With reference to the file:
AUM-2009-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, as a base amount, and then donate it, with 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 a minumum of 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 circa $10.00 AUD per ACO in 2009, 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 50, with an MMQ of $10.
In the 2009 Dana Cloud, as finalised at the EOFY 2009. the FFF dimension
is 47, the initial dimension at BOFY 2009 was 42.

The final cumulative amount of donations, for FY 2009, was $838.00,
which was an augmentation of $328 over the original advance of $500, it
proved to be 5.26% of my gross income, as measured at EOFY 2009, and
would have taken circa $16.00 per week to save for, incrementally, over
the course of a year.

In the 2008 AUM design, the cumulative amount of donations for FY 2008
was $581 which was 4.16% of my gross income for that financial year, the
FFF dimension was 42. With each successive year as a stewardship
competence goal, you always seek to refine the design from three
perspectives:

* Refining the care portfolio of active conscience interdiction
dimensions in the logical stewardship design for that particular
financial year, to best address the emergent problems, both acute and
chronic.

* Seek to increase the percentage of your gross income that is devoted
to donations.

* Seek to increase the fractal fine feathering (FFF) dimension of your
design.

Whereas the 2008 AUM design was intended to be a fairly comprehensive.
spread spectrum of active conscience interdiction dimensions over myriad
logical stewardship domains , the 2009 AUM design was focussed more on
"kicking butts" at the big end of town and the unnecessary discretionary
bastardry therein.

However 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 and meditations, that 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 vectors may become.

The 2009 dana cloud design was not perfect, by any means, but it will do
for FY 2009. 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 in meaning between "exemplar" and "example" in
mind.

This release is the "Final" one, which means that it is the summary and
summation of all the donations and micro-donations for the Financial
Year 2009, from the 1st July 2009 until the 30th June 2010. Initially,
circa the 4th of July 2009, the main "Strategic" design for donations in
FY 2009 was executed, according to the planned budget and criteria. Of
course in the subsequent twelve months, other matters arise and come to
one's attention, and so there are the "tactical" amendments to your
donation patterns in response.

This time around, for instance, there was the inability to donate to
WikiLeaks back in July 2009 due to the great difficulties they were
having with their donation vectors, subsequently corrected, and early in
the New Year, there was the Haitian earthquake, hence the Médecins Sans
Frontières entry, similarly with the discovery of the Environment East
Gippsland campaign against clear-fell logging in Victoria, Australia, so
similarly with the discovery of the Palast Investigative Fund for
independent journalism.

If you are working on a fixed percentage of your gross income as a
budget, then the initial "strategic design", at the beginning of the
intended annual period, could be allocated 80% of the available funds
and the remaining 20% reserved over the remaining year for "tactical"
responses as exigent matters arise or if new dimensions of active
conscience are reconnoitred and discovered. Aligning the annual period
with the Financial Year is very practical for tax purposes, as many, but
not all, active conscience organisations have tax deductable donations.

As always, the work continues, FY 2010 beckons.

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, the former is the version for the
Microsoft office Excel spreadsheet program; the latter is the version
for OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet program:

* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.xls
* AUM-2009-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-2009-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Summary-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 RC7, 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 CoCo 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-2009-Dana_Cloud-Final-DateCode-20100809.zip"

Which can be downloaded from:

http://tinyurl.com/colonelkurtz or http://host-a.net/Colonel_Kurtz/

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

* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.xls - Microsoft Office Excel
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.ods - OpenOffice.org Calc
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Summary-Final.mm    - FreeMind
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-In_Detail-Final.mmp - VisiMap

Note that the "In Detail" and "Summary" mindmaps contain the same data,
the former requires the proprietary VisiMap, and is included for
reference.

Printable PDF documentation:

* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Spreadsheet-Final.pdf (2pp)
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-Summary-Final.pdf (1pp)
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-MindMap-In_Detail-Final.pdf (70pp)

Authentication documentation:

* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Transactions-eBanking-Redacted-Final.pdf
* AUM-2009-Dana_Cloud-Transactions-PayPal-Redacted-Final.pdf