GeckoGoneBlogging

GeckoGo just joined Peace Dot!

Peace Dot is an initiative promoting the message of peace on the web by encouraging websites to create a “peace dot page”.  It all started when some folks at Stanford University’s persuasive technology lab starting thinking about how innovation could be applied to help reduce violent conflict in the world.  So they created a peace dot page on the Stanford university website – peace.stanford.edu – to share some of their interesting research findings on peace, and encourage other websites to create their own “peace dot pages”.

Stanford’s peace dot page shows a directory of all the peace dot pages that other sites have created, and we highly recommend you check them out.  It’s really cool to see how everyone is bringing their own unique perspective to the discussion.

BJ Fogg (who heads the initiative) explains much of the reasoning behind Peace Dot on his own peace dot page and elaborates on his hope that applying the innovation process to this problem will bring about real global harmony in the next 30 years.

The Art of Living sheds light on the importance of meditation and achieving inner peace and how this helps us feel a connection with all of humanity.  (Btw – they are involved in over 150 countries around the world and have done some very cool things in Iraq, Sri Lanka, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Kosovo, and India.)

Ashoka.org has a blog that features social entrepreneurship as a brilliant way of bringing about peace, and the Khan Academy showcases the benefits of education for every child in the world (their performance metric is particularly awesome: 2,378,882 minutes of education delivered world-wide just this past week).

As for GeckoGo, we thought the best contribution we could make would be to highlight how travel helps people from different parts of the world form deep connections with one another, and that human connection is really at the heart of peace.  We’d really like to promote a form of travel that’s less about vacationing, and more about leaving a positive mark on the places we visit.  We asked our members to share personal stories about how travel allowed them to connect with others in ways that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.  Their stories have been both moving and inspiring.  (Thanks guys – you rock!)  Check out our GeckoGo Peace Dot page, and if any of you have any “peace-through-travel” stories you’d like to share, please email them to us at peace@geckogo.com.

The hope is, with all of us innovating and trying things out in the area of peace, we’ll be able to make some significant inroads to some of the world’s most challenging problems.  So to anyone out there with a website, be it in travel, education, or any other area of the web, check out Peace Dot, create your own “peace dot page”, and join the exciting initiative.