“Your beliefs don’t make you a better person, your behavior does.” ~ Unknown
A few years ago Eric Weig showed me a (different) picture of these people in a pew. He kept saying he wanted one, or he wanted to be one, I don’t remember now. I didn’t understand what he was talking about until he told me the story. I had forgotten that story until today, when I walked into the Internet Archive’s main building in San Francisco. I was there for a meeting being held in the main auditorium. The Internet Archive is a former Christian Science Church (it’s not the same as Scientology, just to be clear). When they took over the church, they left the sanctuary intact. In fact, most of their offices are downstairs in the “Sunday School.” Anyway, IA’s founder, Brewster Kahle, was inspired by the Terracotta Warriors, so he commissioned an artist to make clay statues of everyone who works at IA for at least three years. Once made, they’re placed in the pews or along the sanctuary walls. It’s both hilarious and unnerving the first time you walk in, or at least it was for me because I had forgotten Eric’s story. Each statue is about 3 feet tall, give or take, and made of clay. The sanctuary houses over 100 people now. A group of us had lunch with one of IA’s main programmers, and I have to say, I’d work for them long after my clay mini-Ko took her spot on a pew. It’s such a refreshingly forward-thinking group, and the meeting I was in today was filled with equally progressive minds. I chalk this up to one great day.
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