Some of the superplayers leading the way in Urgent EVOKE were personally invited to participate. How and why they chose to get involved says a lot about them. If you think that maybe Alchemy is watching you, perhaps he is. (Are you ready?) As to the truth of these tales, well, I neither confirm nor deny! - Calida

Simon Brookes:

It freaks me out a little to think that Alchemy might have been watching me for the last three years or so. Looking back I think my first encounter with the network was in February 2007 when I was working in the Philippines. I hadn’t long been in post as a lecturer in enterprise at the University of Portsmouth, England, when an opportunity arose to work on a groundbreaking project with the Entrepreneurs School of Asia based in Manila. I was asked to facilitate an innovation workshop with 150 Filipino schools kids to kick off “Teenpreneur”, a project which pairs-up Filipino school children from relatively affluent backgrounds with craft product producers from extremely poor communities. After doing my bit I was approached by a blonde haired woman with a South African twang to her accent. We talked for a while about the project and, in particular, about sustainable development through the seeding of grass roots innovation. Then we shook hands and said goodbye. That was the last time I saw her until two weeks ago.

I was tending my two bee hives in the field opposite my home, decked from head to toe in my white keeper’s suit, when suddenly behind me I heard a woman’s voice say, “I love bees”. Slightly startled, I turned and was surprised to see Calida Debello (as I know now her) standing in front of me. In an attempt to hide my shock I calmly continued to smoke the entrance of one of the hives. “Imagine a world without bees”, I responded casually. “Colony collapse disorder is devastating hives globally”. “Oh I know about that”, said Calida, “CCD is one of The Network’s priority projects”. “The Network! So it does exist?” “Of course” she replied “and you know why I’m here. Are you ready to make a difference?” And I guess I was because here I am, raring to go.

Lauren Soffer (Ineffabelle):

Lauren Soffer’s EVOKE Recruitment Story from Lauren Soffer on Vimeo.

Evonne Heyning (Evo):

Late in 2004 I was talking with Alex @worldchanging; he noted that a new network was emerging with a mission to do good around the world. ONet became my league of bad mofos on a mission to change social entrepreneurship, aid dynamics, philanthropic relationships and all of our engagements in digital space. Our league was small but comprehensive, eventually spinning off in dozens of directions as new initiatives formed and coalitions came together to combat epidemics, genocide and endemic poverty. We met many good hard-working leaders in villages and towns around the world who wanted to do more for their people and for themselves — some of us burned the candle at both ends to send them every shred of support we could muster.

Eventually leaders pull the plug and coalitions move on to the next disaster: what remains are the systems and hidden networks of people with the desire to shift a planet’s worth of dynamics one relationship at a time. Several thousand of the shifters get it and continue evoking that spirit of compassion and practical resourcefulness in their daily endeavors. Calida came along and made sure everyone was speaking the same language — our intuitions about the Alchemist were confirmed as more of her story emerged. All of the things we had known deep in our hearts were true and the playful rabbit hole of possibilities that Calida spoke from gave new life to superheroes in retirement. The passionate spirit of evocative play kept the lights on long after the fire grew dim in their homes as the hidden networks came alive again to address the next challenge.

Nathaniel Fruchter (redct):

Now that I think about it, I was first contacted by EVOKE last year, but I almost dismissed them and severed my ties before I knew anything about them. What a mistake that could have been, huh?

Over the summer, my interest had been piqued by the Iranian protestors. I viewed them as modern day heroes. They were fighting for something that they believed in and were willing to die for it. Modern day George Washingtons, I guess. As it was summer and I had the time and capacities, I decided to lend a hand, along with thousands of other Americans. I ended up developing proxy software. Some time in July, somebody invited me into a chat room. “My name is Calida,” she said. She started bombarding me with questions—and I was hesitant. I stepped away from the computer and let myself have a few “WTF?”s. I closed the window and didn’t think about it for the next few weeks. Two weeks later, the questions started again. Who was I? Why was I helping people halfway around the world? I got rather paranoid. Then, I was asked a question that would change everything. “Look, you’re in school, right? Now, would you like to learn about the world? Or would you like to learn about how to help the world?” Something clicked in me. That day, I learned about Alchemy and EVOKE.

Chelsea Howe:

New York, May 2009. I was defending my thesis on interactive multimedia design, discussing the importance of play (or ludic interaction) in motivating people to engage, involve, and teach themselves new things. I talked about how games can use intrinsic motivation – doing something just for the sake of doing it – to inspire people to do other things tangentially. A game about ancient wars can teach people about historic cultures, playing a leaf identification game can teach people about botany. After my defense ended a 30-something Pepper Potts clone came up to me. “What about evoking people?” she suggested. “What about a game that teaches people to network with each other and fix real problems?” She told me about a man who was connecting people all over the world, right now, to address urgent, global issues. I’d grown up with games that were fairy tales and time sinks – art, yes, but undeniably private and personal. This was a chance to do more, to break boundaries I didn’t know existed. The woman was gone before my mental epiphany had cleared, leaving only a name in her wake. Calida DeBello. I followed Calida’s social footprint out of the real world and into the virtual one, learning about a project called EVOKE as I played an augmented game of hide and seek, searching out more information about the elusive entity. By August I’d gathered enough information to want ‘in’, and since then I’ve been playing life, living a game, whatever you want to call it – but I know one thing for sure; the difference we make is real.

Gene Becker:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I suppose I was introduced to the EVOKE network back in 2005. I was leading a cloud computing research project at HP Labs, and part of the job was meeting with a constant stream of visitors who wanted to learn about the work we were doing. Customers, news media, politicians, foreign delegations, that sort of thing. So one day this group comes in. Very unusual: young, smart, casual, and extremely curious; definitely not the stuffed corporate suits we usually saw. They said they were with Alchemy — their company, I figured — and they wanted to know everything I could tell them about our advanced technology research. How could the cloud support remote collaboration among large groups? Would the cloud be resilient in the face of natural disasters? What was the energy footprint of our datacenter? Would it be feasible to put a fully functional computing infrastructure into a shipping container and drop it, literally by parachute, into the remote backcountry? They were full of wild, ambitious ideas, but they weren’t just dreamers. They were serious about…whatever it was that they were doing. They didn’t tell us what it was, and then they went away. But a few months later, one of them called me on the phone and wanted to ask my advice on a project, and could I keep it low key. I helped her out, the calls continued, and I got drawn deeper into their world. Then one day my contact, her name was Calida, asked me if I was ready to commit to doing something meaningful with my life. That was the day that I joined up with Alchemy and EVOKE, and nothing changed, and everything changed.

Ken Eklund:

New York, August 2008. I had been speaking at one of the CUNY colleges about the lessons of the WORLD WITHOUT OIL game. One of the things I talk about is “elasticity” – how well can your life adapt to changes? If change comes, will your life bend to accommodate it, or will it break? There are several evocative stories from WWO about it. Afterwards, a woman came up to talk to me about elasticity and asked, have you ever wondered where the best crucibles of elasticity are? Or thought of setting up some pipelines that could ship proven ideas about elasticity from these crucibles to places around the world? I had to admit I hadn’t. She urged me to think about doing so, and we talked for a while about the difficulties in getting it started. And then she said, what if someone were already doing it? And that’s how EVOKE recruited me. And they keep me going by feeding me new ideas about what an “elastic life” might be and how to live it.

Joshua Judkins:

November 2009. Wellington, New Zealand. “Okay, are there any other questions about Ponoko?” I smiled at the small circle above my laptop screen, trying to imagine the faces on the other side.

We had covered the basics of putting together a design for laser cutting, uploading it to our site, pricing it on different materials and order it to be made and shipped. With a few of the usual questions, we were finishing up right on time.

Rachael: none from me. Thanks!

Edward: cheers!

The messages popped up in the chat window to the right of my webinar dashboard. They were followed by a series of other goodbyes and thank you messages.

I acknowledged each of them and watched as the attendee list dwindled down to just me and one other.

Calida: I’ve got a couple quick questions before you go.

“Sure Calida,” I said, “Go for it.”

Calida: Do many people make things other than jewelry and decorations?

“Absolutely! We’ve had everything from guitar bodies to tables to Arduino robot parts come through, just to name a few.”

Calida: How about corn planters? Bicycle parts? Windmill blades?

“Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t specifically seeing any of those coming through – what’s a corn planter?”

Calida: We can cover that later. How are you feeling about the future after your work on Superstruct?

“… uh … well, optimistic that change is possible, but in some ways more daunted than I… wait, how did you -”

Calida: If you had the opportunity to start impacting this planet’s future in a significant way right now, what would you do?”

“I would leap at the chance.”

Calida: Fantastic – then you’ll hear from me again soon. Now before I go – how quickly could we get a shipment of custom parts made and shipped to El Salvador?

Mita Williams:

At the time, I thought it was just sheer coincidence that I happened to meet Calida at an unconference dedicated to citizen-led community change and that we both just happen to share a strong interest in the then-obscure field of CI or collective intelligence. But now that I have been made a part of the EVOKE network and I better understand how it operates, I now realize that it wasn’t coincidence at all. One of the reasons why EVOKE has been able to remain so secretive is that it operates just at the border of implausible and possible.

Anyway, that’s when I first met Calida DeBello. She kept in touch after that first meeting. Because I worked as a librarian at a university library, she would sometimes call for help locating research papers that she was having difficulty getting a hold of or finding names of researchers in some pretty bizarre and obscure fields. And then, after some time, she started pressing me about my own work in trying to expand traditional educational and information-literacy practice to include the crowd-sourcing of solutions. And her questions became increasingly more difficult to answer. In the absence of a news-reporting presence, how could citizens fact-check events from across the world? What are some ways to establish trust between people who may never meet? How can you search for something that doesn’t have a name?

And so when she asked me to work for EVOKE, I didn’t hesitate. It was already the work I loved the best.