If you’ve been on the site lately, you’ve seen some of the trading activity. This is a result of a community member trying something a bit crazy. She wrote a blog about it about a month ago. Well, she is the most ambitious trader around and wants to get more involved.

Some of the participants have mentioned they would like the trades to be more serendipitous by having random trades. One member, @jemoreno, even offered the idea of a central location to send them to.  Kind of like an in real life trade with another community member. Well, until we get more Meridians in the wild, we thought we could help out. We are supporting a trading hub at 1wc Headquarters. Here’s how it works.

You send in a Meridian to 1wc HQ with $3.00, a return address, and your username. This will cover return shipping cost with an extra $0.50 going to the donation pool. We’ll register the trade to 1wcHQ so you can see that the Meridian arrived safely. Then, within three days, we’ll get a different Meridian in the mail back to you.

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We know some of you love Meridians and really love trading. We’d appreciate you getting others involved and want to reward you for it. So, we are starting an Ambassador program. It works like this:

1) Let us know you are interested by sending a message to info@worldconnect.me
2) We’ll email you a discount code good for 10% off any purchase
3) Tell friends about Meridians and let them know about the discount code
4) If they choose to buy, we’ll give you 10% of all sales using your discount code, up to $500
5) If you like, you can choose to donate your proceeds from the sales to a charitable organization
6) If your proceeds exceed $500, you choose an organization you’d like the excess to go towards.

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This is a guest post by a community member, @ckmunson, that loves Meridians and the mission One World Connects is pushing to accomplish.  With support of another community evangelist, @gregz, her project has already exceeded her expectations.  Enjoy her thoughts below!

The Meridian Project started as a quick thought on my way out the door to my usual Monday night dance mom duties.  I thought that if I had five meridians, and distributed them randomly among the iRovr social community it would be fun to see how far they could go, how many hands they could pass through, and how many connections could be made.  I put a quick post in the main stream to see if there was any interest within the community with this idea. Within 24 hours I had thirty people interested in joining and I began collecting addresses.

Over a matter of time my project vision had increased by 6 times with a little help from my friends, Greg and Bill.  In mid February, members of the community started to trade meridians among each other and it was amazing to watch.  As these trades began posting in the stream our membership grew and grew. On 2/27/2011, I sent off 34 meridians which was a much bigger bang than I had ever envisioned.  The trading has not slowed down or ceased but instead increased. Not a day goes by that there isn’t two to three meridian posts in the stream showing a happy participant and a note about their new trade and connection. After three weeks of trading we have reached a level of success that far surpasses the indigenous notion of just having five meridians trade around the world. Its hard to really say how many meridians are a part of this project, as the community has bought more to throw into the trading, as well as gifting personal meridians to others who did not yet have a meridian to trade. We have meridians all over the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and soon Saudi Arabia. 

The Meridian Project is an open project and absolutely everyone is welcome to join in.  The goal of The Meridian Project is to foster new connections and celebrate existing friendships.  At first I had thought that we would do this over the course of a year, but I see now that putting a time limit on the project isn’t necessary.  If your interested in joining in The Meridian Project you can find us on One World Connect’s Facebook page, as well is in the One World Connects activity stream. I’ve been asked a lot “how do you find someone to trade with?” and what I have been telling everyone is just ask! Yes, its that simple and I always have a meridian to trade.


- Connie

Here are some pointers as to how the site works today: Because the beta is built to be mobile, it is currently wonky on IE, try Firefox, Chrome, or safari for best results.

Get a Meridian :D

Create an account:

1. On the login screen: enter an email address and password
2. Go to email and verify your account
3. Enter a username
4. Be sure to include your location or else you can’t play.  We will only share your city, state country info.  

Look for activity/new friends:

1. Click on the world tab to see what’s going on
2. Click on user pics/avatars to see profile streams and follow them
3. When you mention someone with an ‘@name’, they’ll get a notification via email

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It’s been just over a month since we launched the beta of our new site.  With anticipation, many of you purchased Meridians before this resulting in direct donations.  That participation has resulted in the donation of over $1000 distributed to a few organizations.  That’s pretty cool!

Now that the site is up (the basics which are 1000% better than the old site) we’re moving in a different direction with donations.  Going forward, we’ll be donating 10% of all sales to a donation pool.  Our community will have input as to how that pool is distributed.  We haven’t fully figured out the mechanism yet, but we plan to have it up and running by next March.  Until then, we’ll continue to add contributions to the donation pool (currently at $150).  Our hope is to make a sizable impact at that time.  

Thanks for all your support and patience as we continue to add features to the new One World Connects.  Don’t forget to start building your Meridians’ Legacies and making trades when you can. (hint: could have impact on how donations are distributed ;)

Cheers,
One World Connects Team 

Well, can’t think of anything to write, so we might as well give a little history on #1wc.  Skipping ahead of actual formation by two years, we needed to find technical co-founders to build the site.  This was in spring of 2009.  We’d been networking in the local ATL startup scene, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the risk.  Understandably, whoever took the role would have been working for peanuts, so we knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task.  
After many attempts and no success, Craigslist become an alternative of last resort.  Since we had scoured the local ATL scene, we had to look elsewhere.  We had to find someone crazy enough to put in a lot of hardwork towards a mission that had a foundation, but was underdeveloped.  We posted an ad in San Francisco that looked something like this:

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We generally have a team call every week in the late evening to talk about where we are and where we are going.   I was especially proud of our team tonight. 

If you didn’t know, we are in bootstrapping mode.  This means we are, as Wendy put it,  “scratching pennies” to get this thing off the ground.  As such, we have to manage our funds closely.  You probably know our model includes donating 10% of profits to charitable organizations.  In the early going, profits will be negative like they are for any startup, which means no donations.  So we made a decision to donate a portion of each purchased Meridian to a charitable organization in the early going.  Plus, we are offering discounts on early purchases since our new site is not available yet.  Essentially, we are donating 20 to 30% of our online purchase price to charities.  Right now, we are supporting Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation with this donation.  (Use discount code “Alex” on the second page of the checkout.  Alex’s story is truly inspiring)

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It’s easy, only 5 steps

1) Get an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper
2) Draw a stick figure head of what you think you look like
3) Personalize it
4) Scan and save as a jpeg file
5) Use as your avatar for all your social media

Voila, you’re done. You didn’t think this would be some easy software trick :)  If you have a better way, let me know.