My grandmother, Leola J. Dyson, spent more than twenty years as a radio personality and director of public relations at WRAP. Leola was an Oprah before Oprah, and she selflessly devoted her life to serving others.
As a child, I went with her as she gathered donated clothes and took them to people who needed them in Norfolk, Virginia. Her life was an ongoing response to the struggles of others. I have carried her example with me ever since.
When my own family experienced hunger, meditation helped me recognize that we were not alone. Other people were living through the same suffering. That understanding opened something beyond the immediate circumstances of my own life: a recognition of our connection and a responsibility to respond. These experiences remain part of the foundation of my work.
The Beloved Community speaks to that recognition. The person who is hungry is our sister or brother. Their struggle belongs within the circle of our concern. Our well-being is connected to theirs and to the well-being of the earth that sustains us all.
All of the technology I create is developed from this understanding. It is part of a continuing effort to bring our technologies, our institutions, and our collective imagination into alignment with Peace, Love, and Purpose.
The Bodhisattva Prayer for Humanity is an anchor for that work:
May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.
The prayer asks something of us. It asks that our understanding and our abilities become available in service to all beings and the earth, with particular attention to those who are suffering. It asks us to recognize suffering, remain present to it, and act with the intention of relieving it.
That intention must guide the ownership, governance, and intelligent infrastructure of Sojourner and IDA. Community ownership carries a responsibility that extends beyond the interests of the owners. The community must attend to the consequences of its decisions for others, for the vulnerable, and for the living world.
This is the purpose that must hold the work together.
Much of what we have come to accept as inevitable is the result of decisions: decisions about who may own, who may govern, whose knowledge matters, and whose needs receive attention. Those decisions are expressed through laws, institutions, and increasingly through technology.
Technology carries the intentions of the structures that produce it. When those structures are organized around concentrating power, their technologies can carry that arrangement into more of our lives. Changing who owns a system leaves an essential question before us: what will that ownership serve?
A community can exercise power in ways that exclude others. It can pursue its own prosperity while leaving another community to bear the harm. It can make decisions that benefit its members while damaging the earth. Shared ownership therefore needs a shared moral direction, expressed through the purposes, policies, and practices of the institution itself.
The Beloved Community and the Bodhisattva Prayer provide that direction for Sojourner and IDA.
They ask us to look beyond the boundary of our immediate interests. They ask whose suffering has gone unseen, whose voice has been excluded, and what the earth is being asked to endure. They call us to place our abilities in service of a freedom that reaches beyond ourselves.
Martin Luther King Jr. brought questions of ownership and power into the struggle for justice. He understood that economic expansion could leave poverty intact and that dignity required people to gain greater command over the circumstances of their lives. His work called for changes in the institutions and relationships that sustained oppression. King, Where Do We Go from Here?
The unfinished work of the Beloved Community asks us to carry that inquiry forward. It asks us to develop institutions capable of joining power with care, and freedom with responsibility to one another.
We have the ability to imagine those arrangements. We also have a responsibility to resist the narrowing of that imagination. When permanent insecurity, ecological destruction, and concentrated ownership are presented as unavoidable, the future is closed before people have had an opportunity to shape it.
I believe we must keep that future open.
Interdependence is central to this possibility. We are not separate from the world whose conditions we are trying to change. Our lives emerge through relationships with one another and with the earth. The knowledge we inherit, the care that sustains us, and the possibilities we discover together exceed any individual account of achievement.
Recognizing this connection changes what we ask of our institutions. Their responsibility extends to the relationships that sustain life, including those that bring no commercial advantage and those whose importance is easily overlooked.
It also changes how we understand service. We are responding within a shared life. The suffering of another person concerns us even when they belong to another community, live beyond a national border, or cannot offer anything in return.
Particular attention to suffering follows from that recognition. A commitment to serve all requires us to notice where care, protection, and resources are most urgently needed. Otherwise, those already able to make themselves heard can continue to receive the greatest attention.
This responsibility must shape what Sojourner notices, how it responds, and whose circumstances inform its development.
Sojourner is being developed to help with the full range of everyday life: answering questions, working through mathematics, writing emails and code, researching, planning, creating, and carrying difficult work forward over time. It can help a person with an immediate task and help communities preserve knowledge and act together. The Beloved Community and the Bodhisattva Prayer guide the care and responsibility it brings to that work.
Someone asking for help with an equation needs a clear explanation. Someone answering an email needs help expressing what they mean. Someone writing code needs a solution they can understand and use. These ordinary activities belong within a life of learning, work, creativity, and relationship. Helping well means attending to the task, respecting the person’s purposes, and being honest about the result.
A continuing relationship allows that help to develop over time. A question can remain open. A discovery can inform what happens next. Something misunderstood can be reconsidered. What has been learned should make the next encounter more attentive and useful.
This is the purpose of the Beautiful Loop: to observe, question, form and test an understanding, learn from what happens, and carry that experience forward. The direction of that learning must remain aligned with service to all and the earth. Greater capability brings a greater responsibility to recognize harm, listen carefully, and change course when needed.
Consider a neighborhood working to establish a community garden. Its knowledge may be scattered across conversations, meeting notes, planting records, and the experience of people who have tended the land for years. The experience we are developing would allow someone to ask Sojourner what the community has learned, what remains unresolved, and what needs attention next.
That attention should extend to the people the garden could serve and the land on which it depends. Who in the neighborhood struggles to obtain healthy food? Can elders and people with disabilities participate? How will the garden care for soil and water? Who has knowledge to offer but has not been included in the conversation?
With permission to use the relevant records, Sojourner should help the community carry this understanding through its work and learn from what happens. The community should retain authority over its knowledge while considering what it can share to help others.
Ownership gives people the ability to direct the work. Alignment gives that direction a responsibility beyond possession.
IDA is being developed as shared infrastructure for computing, storage, communication, identity, and knowledge. Its purpose is to support people and communities in owning and governing the systems through which they communicate, preserve information, host services, and build.
That infrastructure must itself be aligned with service to all beings and the earth. The responsibility reaches into how resources are used, whose access is supported, how privacy is protected, and how decisions affect people beyond the network.
A community should be able to preserve its history without surrendering authority over it. People should be able to share knowledge while retaining control of what remains private. Organizations should be able to maintain the tools they depend on and participate in decisions about how those tools develop.
These freedoms must exist alongside a commitment to prevent the infrastructure from becoming a means of oppression, exclusion, or ecological harm. The ability to own and govern brings an obligation to care for the consequences.
Governance therefore belongs within the design from the beginning. The people affected by a system need standing in determining its purposes and limits. Those experiencing harm need meaningful ways to be heard and to seek change. Decisions must also account for the earth and for future generations who cannot participate in a meeting or cast a vote.
This asks more of governance than simply collecting the preferences of current members. It requires attention to whose interests are absent, whose needs are urgent, and whether a decision is consistent with the purpose the community has committed to serve.
Shared ownership also carries responsibility for maintenance and care. Infrastructure must remain dependable. Knowledge needs to be preserved. People need understandable ways to resolve disagreements and participate without having to become technical experts.
Sojourner and IDA belong together within this responsibility. Sojourner helps people understand, learn, and act. IDA provides the shared infrastructure through which people can preserve their knowledge, coordinate, and exercise collective agency. The Beloved Community and the Bodhisattva Prayer guide what that agency is for.
They also ask us to reconsider what we mean by abundance.
We often speak of abundance as a future condition that technology will eventually deliver. Yet our ability to care for one another also depends on the relationships and institutions we choose to create now. Greater capability can coexist with deprivation when its benefits remain inaccessible to those who need them.
Abundance includes the confidence that care will be available, that knowledge can be shared, and that a difficult period will not sever someone’s connection to community. It includes time to learn, time to recover, and time to be present in one another’s lives.
Our commitment to one another must extend beyond employment and measured contribution. A community includes people across the whole course of life, through changing abilities, circumstances, and needs. Care must remain available through those changes.
The prayer’s resting place for the weary belongs within this understanding.
We have real responsibilities to the earth and to the resources on which life depends. Those responsibilities call for stewardship, ecological restoration, and thoughtful decisions about production and consumption. They ask us to consider whether our ideas of progress support the conditions of life.
We can direct technological development toward healthier communities, greater freedom to learn, and the ability to care without being pushed into insecurity ourselves. Greater capability can help reduce burdens, strengthen public provision, and return time to people. It can help us recognize damage earlier and organize the work of repair.
The direction of development matters as much as its speed.
A future worth pursuing makes room for many ways of living, within a shared responsibility to one another and the earth. Communities need the freedom to determine what they want to build, protect, and change. They also need the understanding and moral courage to recognize when their choices cause suffering beyond their own boundaries.
This will require organizing, public policy, and people willing to build and govern institutions together. Sojourner and IDA are intended to support that work. Their development must remain answerable to the people and places they affect, especially where suffering reveals that our intentions have not yet become care in practice.
I want us to remain ambitious about that possibility. A future centered in peace, social justice, equality, and ecological harmony deserves our attention, our skill, and our sustained effort. The realities we have inherited do not exhaust the futures we can create.
The prayer remains before us:
May I bring sustenance and awakening.
For me, this is an invitation to act—to make what we know, what we hold, and what we can do available in service to all beings and the earth, with particular attention to those who are suffering.
Sojourner and IDA are part of my response.
For Peace, Love, and Purpose.