WOTAA stands for the World Online Transactional Analysis Association and this is the announcement of its launch. Please read to the end to see how you can get involved.

It is intended to be something that brings together everyone interested in TA around the world, in ways which allow them to be in connection and contact with each other, regardless of where they are, how much TA they know, and any other form of difference or diversity that may apply.

We have now published our first Newsletter – click here for the pdf

PPP x 4

WOTAA is based on combating four different privileges:

Physical Presence Privilege – Covid has demonstrated that we can eliminate the physical presence privilege  – we no longer need to restrict our conferences, or our options for serving on international committees, to those who are able to travel to other countries.

Purchasing Power Privilege – WOTAA expects those involved to apply discounts based on  www.numbeo.com (or allow donation amounts chosen by participant) so that fees for conferences, events, training and supervision will be adjusted to reflect the purchasing power of the recipient.

Professional Prerequisite Privilege – working online means that TA qualified professionals can provide their services more readily to those countries which lack accredited TA trainers and supervisors; there are also various TA qualifications that can be attained through online study and assessment.

Phonological Processing Privilege – we need to get away from the idea that you must know English!  Or that you must be in a country where they can afford to translate the English into your own language. There are several volunteer interpreters already associated with WOTAA and we hope that there will be many more.

Permanence

Another aim of establishing WOTAA is to provide some permanence for online connection. Since Covid emerged there has been an explosion of online events but many of these are in the form of separate workshops – great for continuing professional development but they are not necessarily providing an ongoing programme that can lead through to TA qualifications. There are also indications that some initiatives are temporary only and will not continue, or will be significantly reduced, once Covid lockdowns have ended.

Such one-off events are great for continuing professional development but they are not necessarily providing an ongoing programme that can lead through to TA qualifications. For some qualifications, they may not even be counted towards advanced TA training hours, in the same way that attendance at conferences is no longer regarded by IBOC as advanced TA training.

How does WOTAA work?

WOTAA membership is obtained through a simple donation of the price of a cup of coffee in the country of the member. Members may join as individuals or through associations or institutes.

WOTAA has an open access website containing several databases, including details of conferences being offered, training programmes that are leading to qualifications, and events and workshops. For all of this, we will require the organisers to be operating the WOTAA discount system based on numbeo – they can set their prices based on their own country and then scale them up or down. Alternatively, they can allow participants to set their own donation amounts.

There is also be a database of people – anyone can put in their contact details and an indication of their involvement with TA – this can be used for people to get in touch with others with similar interests and language – it can also be used to find other TA students, practitioners, trainers and supervisors. There is a choice of how much information is shown, to other members and to non-members.

We are also planning to run WOTAA conferences. These will be organised as an ongoing conference consisting of 3-4 hour sessions on a weekly or monthly basis – there is no need to run 2 or 3 day conferences when we are not travelling to a venue.

WOTAA also has links to the International Centre for TA Qualifications (www.ictaq.org) because many of the same volunteers are involved. ICTAQ already provides free the International Journal of Transactional Analysis Research & Practice (www.ijtarp.org), the associated Research Exchange (www.taresearch.org)  and the TA Proficiency Awards (www.taproficiencyawards.org) that are operated by volunteers so that TA can be taught to children, parents, teachers, unemployed people, etc, around the world.

IJulie Hay is producing of a series of books that provide reviews and critiques of TA literature and these form the basis for the ICTAQ TA qualifications – these are readily available to all students and trainers who want them – for paperbacks and Kindle versions they will pay only Amazon production and distribution costs, with PDFs and EPUB versions as free downloads. Most of the TTN (TA from Then to Now) series are now available on Amazon (search for Julie Hay) or download the PDF (FREE) at https://bit.ly/TTN-pdfs and/or the e-book (FREE) at https://bit.ly/TTN-ebooks.

Climate Change

Although WOTAA was not established because of climate change, it will help to combat it.  The following are some key points drawn from an article by Sarah Griffiths for the BBC, which you can see at https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think

Accessing the Internet still uses energy so it is not carbon neutral. However it has been estimated that the current carbon footprint accounts for less than 4% of global greenhouse emissions, which is about the same as the global airline industry.

For an individual, a typical business user’s annual use of emails is the equivalent of driving 200 miles in a family car. We can cut this down by keeping the emails short and not sending thank you emails – if every adult in the UK sent one less thank you email per year, it would be equivalent to taking 3334 diesel cars off the road.

Video conferencing produces 7% of the emissions involved in meeting physically – and this is based on assuming car rides of around 20 km, so it will be even better for the climate if we minimise how many people are travelling to other countries.

Getting Involved

You will see some tabs above.  If you click on them, you will see what information we are collecting and making available free.  Please send us feedback about what you think we may have missed  and please go ahead and use the Contact us button in the footer for any questions or suggestions.