Rev. Danny Fisher

Via MahaSangha News:

Buddhactivity.org is an online database, where the world-wide Buddhist community is invited to enter and maintain their own contact and program information.  It is designed to give users one-click access to a comprehensive collection of people, events, businesses and other centers near where they live and around the world.

Buddhactivity.org Dharmic Communities began as a “swiss army knife” web application in 2002: A dharma centre database, a sangha database (phone lists and livelihood directory) and an event database (calendar system). While the WWW provides fantastic communication tools for centres and organizations could there not be a way to consolidate the program offerings of, for instance, the 32 Dharma centres in Atlantic Canada? The Buddhactivity.org innovation solves this by serving up relevant local, regional and global programs with “one click” based on a center’s declared location and Internet domain.

There are several Dharma centre databases on the Web, and yet as centers and organizations change, these frequently fill with obsolete information. Buddhactivity.org sends out periodic reminders to centers for updates. Anyone registered and affiliated with a center is able to update that center’s record. Similarly, everyone registered is able to update their personal and/or livelihood information and post events to the calendar. There is a small annual fee for advertising programs and businesses (and a generosity policy applies), otherwise most system functions are free.

Today there are over 1300 centers in the global database (note: other Dharma center databases list as many as 10,000 worldwide). These are searchable by name, city, province, state, country, region, and year established. Centers are invited to complete over 20 fields of information, including founding teacher, teachers, lineage, number of members, center description and dharmic activities. Centers are encouraged to complete their profiles in their native language as well as English if they so choose.

Reported worldwide center membership stands at 382,599 (with 300,000 from one group in South Korea) Wikipedia Buddhism by country estimates the size of MahaSangha at 350-500 million. To date, 1400 people have registered in the sangha database.