For the last six or seven years, I have been anchoring Smile Card stuffing after Awakin Circles in Santa Clara. The process is simple: we get our share of orders from the KindSpring site, we print labels, count 10 exact cards, stuff the envelopes, affix the labels and stamps, and give it out to people for posting. About a dozen folks end up participating in this. When I first started doing it, I put on my work hat and wanted to automate everything. I wrote up a software the automates the label generation, I looked up card counters that they use in casinos, I ordered pre-stamped envelopes that could be easily put through the printers, and I checked out automate stamping machines that the post-office offers.

Experienced volunteers would gently tell me that getting the job done wasn't the only point, but I was singularly driven by efficiency. This was, after all, to spread smiles in the world. :) I set my target too: "This whole thing could be a one man operation."

Reading last week's Awakin reading, I was reflecting on my journey of stuffing Smile Cards. It took me years to realize the point of efficiency was to get to community; but if you start to apply efficiency algorithms to community too, then you're like a hammer looking for a nail -- simply because you're addicted to hammering. Sure, we had to ship Smile Cards but the other purpose was about togetherness, and when the two are at odds, together-ness is the trump card.

You can see this in action every Wednesday. No one is really assigned any work. Random people are pulled in random ways -- some do it out of gratitude, some do it out of their love for Smile Cards, some do it to busy themselves, some do it for social purposes, some do it as a meditation. Lots of reasons. First timers, old timers, curious timers, everyone jumps in. Each person has their own way of doing things, negotiations in the process give stuffers a chance to interact, and at the end, everything gets done. It works effortlessly like this because enough of us are willing to lend wherever there's a gap. That redundancy is the hallmark of community. If we optimize ourselves out of that, work starts to head in the direction of becoming a chore. Then, we'd just be shipping cards without a smile. :)