Based in the Seattle area, Gaia ICT LLC performs IT consulting services for businesses and nonprofit organizations. Gaia is unique in its focus on people-centered design and appropriate, practical technology solutions. Our goal is to empower organizations by making them more efficient and more capable of accomplishing their mission.

At Gaia we view technology as a powerful tool that can be used to improve lives. We believe that technology, applied in a practical and ethical way, can be leveraged to make lives and organizations more efficient and empowered. It can transform businesses and create social change in the interest of humanitarian, educational, and community development.

We believe that there is a right way to approach technology. We seek to help organizations find the technology solutions that truly fit them best. Gaia's philosophy is to create technology solutions which are:

• People-centered - Focusing first and foremost on your people, culture, and organization. Empowering your most important assets--your knowledge workers.
• Secure - Highly secure and private. Protecting your systems and data.
• Freeing - Our goal is to find solutions which are easy to learn, empowering, liberating solutions that free you from IT worries to focus on what matters most to your organization
• Sustainable - Solutions that are reliable, practical and efficient. Designing with the future in mind, and green for the planet

At the core of the organization Gaia strives to be a highly ethical business. We believe that the most natural way to achieve success is to focus on being a "for benefit" company that works to balance the triple bottom line of people, profits, and planet.

• Integrity - We do our utmost to be consistent, honest and transparent. We value hard work. The quality of our service is measured by the value obtained by the client.
• Community - We believe that everyone plays a vital role in the community--locally and globally--and that it is incumbent on each of us, especially business, to make a positive impact and work toward the common good, practicing compassion for those least fortunate and most vulnerable.
• Balance - We strive to find the healthiest synchronization in our lives between our roles at work, at home, the community, and in society at large. Our business goal is to balance the triple bottom line of people, profit, and planet.

Gaia is very involved in the community. Through our support of local organizations and institutions, volunteer work, and memberships we strive to have a positive impact on our local community and beyond.

Gaia donates at least five percent of reviews to nonprofit organizations.

We embrace the idea of being a technology activist. Locally, regionally, and internationally. Performing services that address digital divide issues is a key part of the organization's goals. Working to bridge the digital divide is not about giving everyone in the world access to a computer connected to the Internet. Instead, being a technology activist is something more basic: fostering equitable access to tools that will improve people's quality of life - quality as they define it, on their own terms. At its root, it's not about the technology. A technology activist is a community activist, a social justice activist, a political activist, an education activist, a development activist. Amazing tools exist that are revolutionizing the way we all live, learn, earn and interact. We believe that everyone in the world should have the same opportunity to benefit from these tools, so they too can make a better life for themselves on their own terms.

About the Name

Gaia (Gai·a [gi-a]) "is the name given to the Greek goddess of the earth. The word means the Earth seen as a person. In Greek mythology, Gaia is the personification of the Earth. The Gaia Hypothesis developed in the early 1900’s is a theory about life processes on Earth: the theory put forward by James Lovelock that the Earth is a inter-connected organism with its own life cycle." 1

While at Gaia we do not strictly endorse this theory per se, the idea of the interrelationship of people and planet and the connected system that they form is a key concept for our organization.

From Margaret Wheatley's 1999 book Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World:2

"And at the grandest level of scale, looking at the earth as a whole, is the Gaia theory, first proposed by James Lovelock. There is increasing support for his hypothesis that the earth is a self-regulating system, a planetary community of interdependent systems that together create the conditions which make life possible." (Wheatley 12).

"Several thousand years ago, when primal forces haunted human imagination, great gods arose in myths to explain the creation of the world. At the beginning was Chaos, the endless, yawning chasm devoid of form or fullness. And there also was Gaia, mother of the earth, she who brought forth form and stability, in Greek story, Chaos and Gaia were partners, two primordial powers engaged in a duet of opposition and resonance, creating everything we know... Like ancient Gaia, we are being asked to partner with Chaos, understanding it as the life process that releases our creative power." (Wheatley 115) "...it is, after all, only meaning that we seek. Nothing else is attractive; nothing else has the power to cohere an entire lifetime of activity. We become like ancient Gaia, boldly embracing the void, knowing that out of Chaos' dark depths we have the strength to give birth to order." (Wheatley 134)

Bibliographic Reference:

1 Microsoft® Encarta® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

2 Wheatley, Margaret J . Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999