Jason Pearce

I decided to close down one of the websites I developed in 2005 called www.thirdgoal.com. Andrew Meyerson of www.thirdgoal.org has built a nice website and has some good momentum. I’m providing him the .com domain to drive more traffic to his .org for the Peace Corps’ 50th Anniversary. Here’s what I wrote about the closing on Thirdgoal.com:

Dear ThirdGoal.com Friends,

It is with mixed emotions that I inform you that ThirdGoal.com will no longer be accepting exciting stories from Peace Corps volunteers or fielding curious questions from prospective volunteers.

I created ThirdGoal.com in February 2005 “out of a desire to provide Peace Corps volunteers a free, easy, and independent way to share their stories with the rest of the world, not just Americans.”

In that time, more than 200 people have visited the site to either write about their own Peace Corps experience or ask questions of others. I am both grateful and proud of the community and content ThirdGoal.com has helped facilitate. In many ways, the time I spent volunteering to develop and manage ThirdGoal.com was more sustainable than the brief time I spent serving in Guyana.

The time has come for ThirdGoal.com to reach its “close of service” (a Peace Corps term for “Thanks for serving, now it’s time for you to go home”) and to be replaced with a new wave of anxious, passionate, and energetic volunteers. One of those volunteers is Andrew Meyerson, who served in Morocco from 2005-2007 and recently launched ThirdGoal.org.

Andrew has created a wonderful website at ThirdGoal.org to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps in 2011. Similar to ThirdGoal.com, ThirdGoal.org is focused on collecting the best stories, photos, and videos of the 200,000 Peace Corps Volunteers who have served since 1961. In 2011, he hopes to publish a coffee table book with the best content and donate all of the proceeds from the sale of the book to help fund Peace Corps projects around the world.

I support Andrew’s efforts and was looking for a way to contribute toward his momentum. I realized it was time for me to pass on the ThirdGoal.com domain.

Starting November 15, 2010, all traffic to ThirdGoal.com will be redirected to ThirdGoal.org. The content of ThirdGoal.com will be moved to thirdgoalarchive.jasonpearce.com. This new home will serve as an archive of the great content and questions its visitors have submitted over the years. The site will no longer accept new articles or comments.

If you submitted content to ThirdGoal.com and wish to share it with ThirdGoal.org, Andrew would love to hear from you. Please visit his site to share your story, photos, or videos of your experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Thank you all for participating in ThirdGoal.com.

Sincerely,

Jason Pearce (Guyana, COS 2002)

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the Peace Corps, mostly because I don’t think much about it beyond my efforts of continually to funding and administering a website I created called ThirdGoal.com.

Peace Corps’ Goals

Most Peace Corps experiences last two years or less. The volunteer arrives to a country, gets trained, moves to a small village, and spends two years attempting to make a difference at a very local level.

The efforts of most Peace Corps volunteers likely accomplish two of the Peace Corps three goals very well while they are in service:

• To help the people of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained workers
• To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served

The third goal of the Peace Corps, however, is mostly unobtainable to the average Peace Corps volunteer during their term of service, which is to…

• To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans

Sharing stories as they happen

It’s easy to understand how difficult it is to actively share your experiences as a volunteer to Americans when you are located thousands of miles away and are subject to intermittent power and water.

As an information technology volunteer for the Peace Corps, however, I had regular access to internet connected computers and managed to share my story as frequently as possible to as large of an audience as I could reach. I did so by blogging about my Peace Corps experience, posting photos, and producing MP3 recordings for people to download (a rudimentary podcast of sorts). I did all of this in 2002 from Georgetown, Guyana.

A sustainable experience

During training, one of the lessons that the Peace Corps tries to instill in its volunteers is to offer their local community a sustainable experience. This means that the community should not become dependent on the services and skills offered by the volunteer, who is scheduled to return to the states in two years. Instead, teach those skills so that they may continue to help themselves long after your departure.

What I find interesting about all of my efforts in promoting “a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans” by posting as much about my Peace Corps experience as it happened — even to my own demise — is how sustainable my efforts in 2002 have been.

ThirdGoal.com continues to receive more than 2,000 unique visitors a month who spend on average more than three minutes reading about the experiences of other Peace Corps volunteers. And while the quantity of phone calls and emails received regarding my experience and early departure have all but vanished, the community blog that I created at ThirdGoal.com continues to retain a steady and sustained pattern of use.

Peace Corps Wiki

In the past couple of months I have exchanged a series of phone calls and emails with Mike Sheppard and Will Dickinson, two individuals who are also interested in better organizing the wide and growing volume of content that more and more Peace Corps volunteers are posting to the web.

They have built PeaceCorpsWiki.org, a community-driven website focused on serving as a collaborative institutional memory for Peace Corps volunteers.

While I am not directly involved in the project, I am serving as an adviser of sorts. Recently, Mike and Will were interviewed on their efforts, during which they commented on ThirdGoal.com and my objectives.

“Jason encountered problems in 2003 when first started pod casting from Guyana; this lead to his early departure from PC. When he returned to the states he started “Third Goal” and the site has continued to grow over the past few years and is a terrific example of a sustainable Peace Corps project. It certainly meets “Goal Three” of Peace Corps ! “Thirdgoal.com” the first Peace Corps related website to my knowledge to successfully make use of Web 2.0 technology.”

Will’s quote reminds me of what Patrick Joyce once said to me while he was still serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guyana; “Jason, while your Peace Corps service may have been short lived, ThirdGoal.com might become the most sustainable thing the 20 of us will ever do.” Patrick was one of the 20 volunteers who I served with in Guyana and was a good friend.

I wish Will and Mike the best as they work to better organize and document the knowledge hundreds of volunteers contribute all over the web.

My guest this year for the Indianapolis 500 were Peace Corps buddies Darren McLaughlin, Justin Long, and Hans Anderson. I served in Guyana with these guys three years ago. It was great having them in town, sharing old stories, and treating them to the race. As you can see, I think they had a great time.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Third Goal Wiki, an enterprise established for the sole purpose of “Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans,” the Third Goal of Peace Corps.

We would like to share this wiki with current and former Peace Corps volunteers that have stories to share, ideas to exchange and thoughts to explore that will help ThirdGoal.com promote the ideal of cultural exchange.

What’s the difference?

ThirdGoal.com is a blog (an online journal) while wiki.ThirdGoal.com is, well, a wiki (a community developed project). Both rely on you, the user, to create, edit, and share content.

If you are a current or former Peace Corps volunteer, you are invited to participate in both.

Shameless Tag Line

Third Goal (blog or wiki) – helping Peace Corps volunteers share their stories.