GCX: Our Story: When we started

The concept behind GCX was born in the summer of 1981 when Jai and Prema Hudes began parenting a "living book" designed for "improving communications" through "better relationships." This resulted in a number of projects and mechanisms promoting "local and global community building." One such element was the "All's Clear Game", which evolved into the Imaginator device. Over a decade period, playing many hundreds of games and "Playshop encounters" this communication tool continued to evolve into a number of interactive stories, games, tools and relationship building devices.

The release of the internet into the public domain by the military, with its eventual mass commercialization sent a clear signal that the time was nearing for these interactive, multimedia globally connecting tools to be deployed.

Let's fast forward to 1995 . . .

The "Snapshot of Los Gatos" project is initiated. This grassroots concept was launched to "build" and promote local community through intermixing the internet and traditional media programs. A custom designed, City Design caricature map was created to represent the Los Gatos community. Along with the print distribution of these colorful maps, we launched one of the first registration based, "clickable online contests" on the web. This online exploration was designed to drive users to further explore the map, its sponsoring businesses and the town at greater depth. From the success of this project, Jai founded an early "dot.com company (wwwebport.com) which doubled as its website location. The "World Wide WebPort" was a unique research and development project integrating education, entertainment and commercial viability into a global community model. As a sustainable business WebPort assisting small businesses in the development of their web presence, trained clients and began to establish local and global community locations. This experimental community building location helped evolve our present web-software concepts. From 1996-98 Webport produced the "San Jose, Capital of Silicon Valley" project and "Hunt the Sharks" contest. Similar to the Los Gatos "hometown" project, the stakes were raised in a more lucrative, higher profile "big city" production, with the San Jose Sharks and City of San Jose as sponsors. A one of a kind, custom "SharkMobile" was given away as grand prize!

In 1998, WebPort was approached by a member of the "Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization" (UNPO) to model his digital community building programs into a global economic platform. Contracted to build a prototype of this "digital network" the concept continued to develop into the Peace Portal website. In March 1999 this "Think Global, Act Local" concept became the Los Gatos eXperience. Completely self funded over the course of a year and a half, LGX proved itself a viable business and community model. In June, Peace Portal was invited to participate in the World Peace & Prayer Day. This important gathering was a powerful turning point in the course that would be followed for the coming years. In the following year with a small team, WebPort launched the beginnings of a Santa Cruz X, Silicon Valley X and California X projects. (Each of these projects are under different stages of their construction.) The initial Global Community eXperience site was also built to figure out how this network would be structured and what technologies would be needed.

On January 1st 2000, Jai and Prema formed the Global Community eXperience, Inc., to manage the expansion of their global vision. Since then, GCX has evolved its network building capabilities, identified its core technologies, continually building strategic relationships, offered training programs, refining its business model with a strategic steering committee that spans a spectrum of high calibre individuals like Chris Thomas, Intel's eBusiness strategist, to Ron Browning an ex-Buddhist Monk turned corporate councilor. Dozens of others have contributed time and effort, heart and soul to "figure out" how to rein in such a vast vision—with our goal, to produce a scalable, socially effective, economically viable, compelling community network infrastructure. For over 8 months a high level, Intel eBusiness team worked with us directly to help craft our business plan, while producing a powerful "White Paper" about our LGX effort. With our present technology partner, Salim Lahkani, we are building one of the most comprehensive, simple to use, updateable, interactive suites of "open source" community tools available. With partners like DigitalSpace, we are adding Instant Messaging capabilities and developing one of the first fully interactive, geographic based Virtual Reality locations in the world using Adobe's new Atmosphere's Virtual world building technology.

In January 2002 it was decided that GCX would become a nonprofit organization . . . perfect timing for the invitation it received to become a central "community" feature for the newly hatched 1Earth Content Delivery Network. The first collaborative project with 1Earth was the 2001-2 First Night Celebration in Santa Cruz. As of this update, we are a week away from landing in Salt Lake City for the Winter Olympics, as a multimedia production partner contracted to capture the Navajo 2002 Pavilion and grounds and to kick off our new "national" site, the Native American eXperience.

Go to the Los Gatos eXperience "Founder Story" for a more complete background tour.