Like philanthropists love and misanthropists hate the humankind, I’ve come up with „mensanthropist“ as a new word to represent someone who actively utilizes intelligence for the benefit of humanity, specifically by doing something beneficial for humanity that people with lower intellect would not be able to do.
Many of you might want to do something like that but you are lacking ideas of what exactly it could be. The aim of this series is to provide you with inspiration by introducing such ideas brought to life by other Mensans or bright people in general. In this first episode I will start with the one I know the best, myself…
I have always tended to find some opportunity to do something useful, impact of what outreaches my life and the closest relatives. When I was nineteen, I used e-mail to start contacting people who used Macintosh computers, to bring them together and form a kind of club. At that time it was a rarity in Czech Republic to have a Mac, so finding someone to help you with it was not easy. Just about a year later I got the idea to found an official non-profit organization.
The legal form suitable for this purpose in 1996 was called civil associtation, and there were at least three peoeple required to found it, at least one of which needed to be of legal age. I managed to get two students from that e-mail group, Ondřej Bojar and Jakub Nešetřil, agree to go for it with me. Gradually, several other enthusiasts joined us, and for the following years we organized regular meetings, published CDs with freeware and shareware software, and even a printed magazine called Zrušit (Cancel), inspired by one of the most common button names in Mac dialog boxes.
We helped a lot of people, number of members growed to seven hundred, and as a side effect we gained some management and organizational skills. Later on, as we got jobs, our free time started to be tight, the release of iPhone and iPad made Apple more popular, and new modern communities appeared, so our club activities went slowly away, but the mailing list remained operational for twenty years.
Some years later I got married and my son was born, and as he growed and started thinking and playing games on iPad, he got interested in Minecraft. He liked he could play online and communicate with other kids in the virtual world and work on projects togeter with them. So with him and for him I created our own Minecraft server. We called it TrainMazeLand, because my son loved trains and I liked buliding mazes.
I wanted to make our server different from all other servers, so that it sustains for a long time and brings something useful. So I treated it a bit unusually, set very strict rules of behavior and conditions to join our A-team. That’s how Czech servers typically called staff, the group of players taking care of the server.
We required staff members to be polite, patient, loyal, and team players. We held regular online meetings with exact structure and discussion rules. Most of the kids playing on the server were between eight nad thirteen years, but it took them only few weeks to learn how to make fair decisions and have a good feeling from helping others. The server is still functional as of now and offers, for instance, the largest Minecraft maze with 10080 rooms, which you can find your way through if you know the value of Pi to sufficient precision.
When building the Minecraft server I came across a need to be able to somehow easily extend its abilities So I got an idea and wrote a plugin that allows for easily programming add-on features features using a language similar to BASIC. That was the first programming language I learned when I was eleven, and I still consider it easier to understand than all the modern object oriented languages. Within only three years over eight hundred of children installed the plugin on their servers, and many of them are still writing me that my plugin MadCommands was their first programming experience.
Now I am again looking for some new inspiration through interviewing interesting people and discussing their projects. If you know a person or project who would be a good subject for this series, please let me know by e-mail to mensantop@mensa.cz or join the Mensantrhopist group at the Mensa Workplace. And if you personally want to become a mensanthropist but don’t know what to start with yet, I hope this series will help you to get inspired.