The State of the Sandwich

Dear Reality Sandwichers,

We are happy to announce that Reality Sandwich's parent company, Evolver LLC, has received an initial investment. We intend to use this investment cautiously, with the goal of turning our project into a sustainable enterprise and successful business, over time. To start, Daniel and Ken have been able to bring on our first full-time employee, Evolver Community Director Jonathan Phillips, along with a part-time Senior Editor, Steven Taylor.

We see our essential mission as serving the burgeoning community who share our passions, curiosities, and values. We also look forward to creating practical tools, exchange systems, a social network, and a program of events to bring this community closer together. Ultimately, our goal is to assist in the larger mission of aiding a large-scale transition to an ecologically balanced, nonviolent, and equitable planetary culture.

We are currently developing a marketplace environment, Evolver Exchange, which we will launch next month. We hope the Evolver Exchange will create a unique environment that fosters a personal relationship between craftspeople, healers, and makers of sustainable goods, and people looking for products and services that inspire and excite them. In the future, we intend to introduce new tools and platforms that will allow our community to explore alternative systems of exchange that do not involve monetary transactions. Through our business development director, David Latimer, we are also developing a physical store location in Oakland, California, where Evolver events will take place, and goods made by our network of craftspeople and artists will be sold. (More on this later!)

We are also developing a social network environment, Evolver.net, which will allow everyone in our community a chance to express the full range of their ideas and creative expressions, and connect with each other in a myriad of ways. We consider the most popular social networks currently on the Web, including Facebook and MySpace, to be ethically compromised as one of their central revenue sources is the sale of personal data from their users, and they also make certain copyright claims over material placed on their sites. The Evolver.net social network will be based on different principles and underlying agreements. We will not sell any of your personal data to outside sources, and we will reassign all copyrights back to authors and creators, as we do with the material that appears on Reality Sandwich.

We feel very grateful for the interest and support we have received from you up to this point. Since we launched last spring, Reality Sandwich has had over 300,000 unique visitors and 1,650,000 page views. Nearly 1,000 articles have appeared on the site. We're now averaging 50,000 unique visitors a month, and it keeps growing.

We hope that you will assist us in the process of developing this project so it can become a catalyst of transformation on an even larger scale. To this end, we have a few favors to ask of you.

First of all, we have created a Reality Sandwich Survey, and we would truly appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to fill it out. We don't like surveys much either, but it will help us to plan some new features we'll be rolling out. We also hope to attract more and bigger advertisers to the site, and they will only sign up if they know more about our audience. We admit that we are also curious to learn more about you, albeit in this vague, anonymous, and sociological sense. If you have five minutes, it'd be great if you could do the survey now.

Secondly, we have added a number of tools for disseminating our articles through other news services, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Technorati, and Delicious. You'll see them at the bottom of every article. When you read an article that excites you, if you could take a moment to register for one of these services and use it to tell others about your enthusiasm, we would greatly appreciate it. The type of articles and essays we are publishing are still unfamiliar to most people, and don¹t fit obviously in the usual media mix or journalist formula. By promoting and marketing these types of ideas, we can create a new cultural filter for people to consider what is happening in our world.

Thank you so much for your attention and interest in our project! We feel very lucky to have made it to this point, and look forward to what the future will bring.

Yours,

Daniel Pinchbeck

Ken Jordan

Michael Robinson

Jonathan Phillips

Dan Robinson

David Latimer

Brandie Hardman