Here is a draft of our Frequently Asked Questions, with answers for all of them. You can read this online as a Google Doc, or if you prefer you can download it as a Word file.

- To read it as a Google Doc, click here

- To download the Word file, click on this link: IdealistNYCFAQ

You can then share your thoughts as a Comment at the bottom of this page, or by emailing me directly at ami@idealist.org (in which case you can also send me the Word file with any edits you’d like to suggest). Whatever works best for you.

Thanks in advance for reading this and letting us know what you think. Every bit will help: Is everything clear? What’s missing? What did we forget? What else would help you there?

As we receive your suggestions, we’ll be editing and adding throughout this week (you’ll see the changes as we make them), and by Friday we hope to have this done.

Thanks again! What you’ll see under those links is the result of hundreds of conversations with all of you, and we couldn’t have gotten to this point without you.

We can see your face now!

It’s exciting to see some of you getting started on the forums. To make it more useful and fun, we added a couple of features.

1. The forums now have avatars, so you can tell at a glance who’s talking
2. It’s now possible to add an Idealist Profile link on your forum page, which allows others to easily access your profile to Connect and send you private messages.

If you don’t have a forum account yet, you can sign up here!

Welcome, and thanks in advance for your thoughts. As we wrote you, please take a look at this initial list of questions and use the Comments at the bottom of the page to suggest any additional ones. No question is too small or too detailed, so don’t be shy. (If you’d like a bit of context for some of these questions, see the updated About page at the top of the site.)

By Monday evening we want to have all of these questions – and any others you may suggest between now and Sunday – answered to your satisfaction. We’ll keep updating this list here, and then we’ll start answering these Qs on a separate document, which we’ll share for your feedback as we go. Thank you!

THE BIG PICTURE

1. What’s this project all about?
2. What’s the ultimate goal? How will we know if we got there?
3. How will we measure progress?
4. What are our shared values?
5. How will we work with other organizations?
6. Will we work in different languages?
7. What about people with no Internet access?
8. What is this called?
9. How do we protect the brand?
10. Does anything go, or are some kinds of action not allowed?
11. What about other online tools? (Meetup, Facebook, Craigslist)?
12. How is this project funded?
29. What is it about this new idea that will do a better job of translating intention into action?

CONNECTORS AND IDEALIST GROUPS

13. What is a Connector?
14. What is a “setting?”
15. What do Connectors do?
16. What do Connectors not do?
17. What is an Idealist Group?
18. What roles can different Connectors play in a Group
19. I want to be a Connector. What do I do?
20. I want to start or join an Idealist Group. What do I do?
21. How do I connect with other people involved in this project?
22. What support will Idealist provide?
30. What kind of formal agreement should exist between Idealist, Connectors, and community projects?

THE IDEALISTNYC PILOT

23. Why start in New York City?
24. What exactly is happening during the week of May 7th?
25. How will we promote this across the city?
26. What’s the timeline for the Pilot? When do we go beyond New York?
27. What if I’m not in New York? How can I get involved?
28. I don’t have a lot of time, but I want to support this initiative, what can I do?
31. How do we all stay in touch?
32. How do we spread the world and let the community know that we are here to help?

Please note that we’ll keep the numbering unchanged for every question so that you can more easily see any new ones when you come back, and so that we can refer to them by number later. (This may mean that as we add more questions and reorganize the categories, the numbers will no longer be in straight order at some point.)

Lindy, a Connector who joined the network this summer, is a member of a Socratic conversation club who meet monthly to discuss different topics.

Recently, she proposed to the group that they run the 3Qs activity and see what types ofunrealized intentions would bubble to the surface. On January 19th, sixteen people met and discussed their answers to the questions “What would you like to do to help others?”; “Why haven’t you done it?” and “What would help you to do it?”.  

The meeting flowed nicely, and everyone had three minutes to share their thoughts, which ranged from wanting to convert an abandoned facility into a hospital for the homeless to teaching job skills to the unemployed to empowering young women to feel good about themselves and their bodies. There were two clear takeaways for Connectors: being prepared to focus on a specific and manageable next step for someone with a big idea, and second, encouraging people who have a specific idea of what they want to do to seek out existing nonprofits who might be working on that particular issue.

Experimenting with 3Qs meetings now can help all of us learn more about being effective Connectors in our settings. If you have a 3Qs story to share, please let us know how it went by posting on the forum.

Wednesday afternoon, we had a great meeting around our preliminary storyboard for a 90-second video about this network. A small group of volunteers came in for an hour or so to talk about big-picture objectives for the video, and gave us lots of great comments about the initial ideas we presented.  We plan to meet again in a couple of weeks to share more ideas. If you’re interested in seeing the initial sketches, you can download the doc here (with apologies in advance for my drawing. And my penmanship.)

Nicole, Barbara, and Mike discuss the storyboard

This Wednesday, February 1st, we’re meeting with volunteers who are interested in helping create a brief video about this network.  We’ll present our rough storyboard for feedback and talk about next steps.

There are two meetings on Wednesday: one at 2:00pm and another at 7:00pm. If you like working with video and want to join for one of the sessions, please email Mike — mike.sayre[at]idealist.org.

Every little bit helps. (Photo: Australian War Memorial Collection, Flickr/Creative Commons)

You may remember from, a few months back that Henrique started talking to people at his university. Now he’s helped us kick off by listing his Idealist Group on Idealist.org. Nice work, Henrique!

Click to see Henrique's Idealist Group on Idealist

Welcome back, Connectors!  At this week’s meetings we shared with over thirty of you a more fleshed-out vision for how Idealist Groups can work, and fielded lots of insightful comments and questions. The feedback has been really positive, and we’re looking forward to more meetings coming up next week. Have a great weekend, all!

Discussing Idealist Groups at this morning's meeting

We’ve got lots of exciting work to do. Good luck in the new year!

One of our goals is to create a video to explain the ideas behind the network more easily. We just got out of  a very productive brainstorming session, and started producing some initial sketches and script ideas.

Hopefully it'll look a bit better than this

Soon we’ll be ready to share these ideas with the 20+ of you who said you’d like to help with video (or with anyone else who’s interested!). Do you have an idea that would help us make this into a compelling visual?

We had another excellent Connector orientation last night. Lots of great questions were asked and answered, and almost everyone stuck around to chat when the meeting was over.

Thanks to everyone who came and brought such wonderful energy and enthusiasm!

Sharing our answers to the 3Qs

Remember my bar night with my friends Kate and Dave? Dave told me that our conversation that night reminded him of this three-minute TED Talk by Derek Sivers:

Do you tend to be more of a dancing “nut,” a “first follower,” or one of the others who join the dancing crowd? There’s no right answer; I’m just curious how this might resonate with members of the network.

For better or worse, this year I’ve been more of a…fourth dancer. Maybe my 2012 resolution should be to jump up and groove, or at least first-follow, a little more often.

Did you miss our last Connector Orientations? We’ve got one on the calendar for next Tuesday, December 13th. Click here to sign up.

This orientation is for people who want to help shape the Connector role with IdealistNYC, and to start playing that role in their community. (If you are intrigued, but still not 100% sure, that’s fine too.)

If you are not familiar with this whole idea, please watch this video before attending the orientation. Thanks!

In my last blog post I promised to ask the 3Qs at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Some unexpected things came up, and while I did make the Jello, I didn’t have that conversation with my family. But I did pose the questions to some friends at a bar this week and remembered how fun it can be.

Botanica in Nolita has a back room that's quiet enough to have a thoughtful conversation about the 3Qs...at least on a Tuesday night. (Photo by Youngna Park / NYMag.com)

At Botanica on Tuesday, my friend Dave asked “What’s new at Idealist?” I gave him a quick rundown of the meetings we’ve held so far and quickly explained the Connector role. This was easy because our mutual friend Kate, who also sat with us, is a natural connector. (Evidence: Dave and I wouldn’t have collaborated on things if Kate hadn’t introduced us.) I used her as Exhibit A and said, “Once we’ve invited all these Kate-types to get together and support one another, then we think they could help a lot of different people in their communities by asking three simple questions. Want to try them out?”

They were game:

Julia: OK. What’s one thing you’ve wanted to do?

Kate: Well…I kind of want to learn to sing.

Dave: I’ve always wanted to go skydiving.

Julia: There’s a writing project I’ve been meaning to start for a year.

Lesson #1: No intention is too “light.”

Now, these are not the kinds of ideas folks typically share, because usually Connectors ask something like “What’s something you’ve wanted to do, big or small, to make the world a better place?” Ultimately, our goal at Idealist is to use the Q’s to fuel positive change, big or small, in neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and other settings.

We continued:

Julia: Now, what’s stopping each of us from doing those things?

Kate: I’m a little nervous about singing in front of a stranger, and I don’t know how to find the right voice teacher.

Dave: Um, fear of death.

Julia: I’m prioritizing too many “extracurriculars” and don’t know how to execute it the way I want to.

Lesson #2: Take turns in the “hot seat.”

Dave pointed out later that my participation, and the fact that we took turns, helped to build trust. Voicing an intention that you haven’t acted on is personal and can be intense, even between friends, even at a bar. As Connectors ask these questions more and more, it might be easy to forget how it feels to answer them. If someone’s opening up to me, I don’t want to take that for granted.

Julia: OK. So what would help each of us do what we want to do?

Kate: I’m realizing that this isn’t about finding a vocal coach. I think if I could start out singing with friends, more casually, that would help me get more confident.

Dave: I need to get a group of people together to go skydiving.

Julia: And I need to stop being such a perfectionist and just start.

Lesson #3: Know when to quiet your inner Connector.

Note that the “obstacles” we shared in Q2 weren’t the actual obstacles!

In my experience, Connectors are people who really, really want to help – which means we need to be sure we’re really, really listening. There can be a lot of satisfaction in suggesting a solution to someone, and we need to be careful not to get carried away and propose solutions before we understand the real problem. We also need to trust that others in the circle may have better solutions than our own.

If I had asked Kate to answer all the questions first, and then turned to Dave, and then gone myself, we might have lost steam or become distracted. Once we all shared our intentions, we got really curious about the obstacles and very committed to scouting solutions. We saved suggestions for the end, and avoided any risk of “Connector as expert” power dynamic.

So what suggestions did we come up with? Well…

• I told Kate I know someone who actually started a weekly singing circle in Brooklyn and I could introduce her. I swear I am not making that up.
• Kate and I didn’t promise to go skydiving, but we did suggest that Dave look at sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to see if there are any cheap skydiving deals that might make it easy for him to invite friends to go.
• Kate and Dave asked me to share my writing prompts with them, and they’re going to help kick off my series.

Pretty fun! Like lots of wound-up, overprogrammed New Yorkers, the 3Qs need space to breathe. Why not take ‘em to a bar or a holiday party this season? If you do, I’d love to hear how it goes.

The last couple of months have been really exciting as we’ve begun to hear stories of early adopters taking concrete steps to make this network a reality where they are.

After seeing people take these initial steps, and based on feedback from the orientations we held in September and October, we’re improving the Connector orientation materials. If you’ve already been through an orientation, don’t worry: the basics are the same. But we’ve found some areas where we can be more clear, particularly with the next steps a Connector can take to get started in their setting.

If you’ve already attended the first presentation or watched it on video, and you’re ready to be a Connector, you can sign up for the next Connector orientation here.

New York’s diversity offers us a unique opportunity to start a multi-lingual, multi-cultural movement. Even at this early stage, we already represent over 20 languages, including all seven officially-supported languages of the city of New York: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and Haitian Creole. Muy bien!

Languages spoken by IdealistNYC volunteers

My grandma's Jell-o salad. Yes, that is grated cheese atop the marshmallow topping.

Ah, Thanksgiving. The stuffing, the mashed potatoes, Grandma’s Jell-o…and inevitably, the moment when my eager sister declares, “OK, it’s time to go around and each name something we’re thankful for!” While the answers are always heartfelt, they’re not always substantial – or, if they are, the conversation might devolve into awkward political arguments or even gossip.

What if we replaced that icebreaker with the 3Qs? (For those who are new to this blog, the “3Qs” are three questions we encourage Connectors to ask their communities in order to uncover hidden good intentions and help others make good on them.)

Picture it: While we slice the pumpkin pie, my aunt might ask how things are going at work. I could tell her, “We’ve been building a network of people, starting in New York City, who identify as ‘Connectors’ in their community. We believe they can get a lot done by asking friends, neighbors, and colleagues what they’d like to do to make the world better; why they haven’t done it; and what would help.” If her eyes start to glaze over, I can quickly move from the theoretical to: “Here, let’s try it. What’s something you wanted to do since last Thanksgiving? It can be anything.”

Imagine what might follow – how much we might learn from and about one another with the help of these neutral and just-specific-enough questions. Sure, Grandma might say she wants to teach us the Jell-o recipe once and for all, so we stop pestering her to make it. But maybe my mom wants us to participate in the Storycorps National Day of Listening, or my aunt wishes she could improve some aspect of life in her assisted living community, or my cousin’s been meaning to help with hurricane relief but isn’t sure where to send donations. How might we feel after sharing these ideas, and how might they inform our plans for December and the new year?

I think I’ll try to find out. If you try it too, please leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know what happens: julia [at] idealist.org.

Connect to Sabrina on Idealist

Sabrina Whiteman used the 3Qs to help friends take their next step:

I started the conversation very casually sharing the exciting things Idealist was up to. Very brief. Then I just dropped the three questions. Both women expressed wanting to work with children and gift-giving. Just so happens I used to be on the board of a nonprofit [Brooklyn Children's Holiday Fund] that does that for Christmas. I recommended participating in their program because you see the direct results, gifts go to the most needy. Done deal.

Right now my role would be to remind them closer to the date and possibly introduce them both via email to the volunteer coordinator.

I’m still practicing my connector moves but I feel like I am off to a decent start.

Thanks for sharing, Sabrina!