remediation

https://dribbble.com/shots/552726-Watchtower?list=users

I think a lot of people don't know exactly what it is that I do. What it is that I'm working towards. What the metamaps project is about exactly. And many more things. I'm considering taking up some more regular lightweight blogging to remedy this, so consider this a first.

Who am I?
My name is Connor Turland and I was born in 1991 in a farm house in rural southwestern Ontario, where I lived till I was 17. My demeanor is soft, friendly, open hearted and open minded. How I ended up so deeply immersed in a world of Open Value Networks, web platform design -development - architecture, founding a business, and extreme virtual collaboration probably has to do with some interests that started developing around 2009, during and after my first year at the University of Waterloo.

I was always interested in social justice, environmentalism, and the sort, but not much in the spirit of protesting. Since 2010, when I moved into an intergenerational intentional household in Waterloo, I heightened my awareness that what we most need for cultural transformation is:
1. to each of us transform our own thinking and acting
2. to transform (read: improve) how we think and act together
3. better tools to help us transform our own individual thinking and thinking together

The household I lived in was laser focused on the first two, and I spent two and a half years there, marveling at the learning opportunity, and obsessing about scaling the kind of work we were doing together to larger groups. There were also many technologies that we used and explored, but mostly of the non-digital sort.

I've always been a highly tech-savvy person, and drawn to working with hardware and software, and eventually spent much of my time at the house considering what kinds of digital technologies could support and enhance, and help broadcast all of the learning emerging within the household.

Of course, I imagined, if we were having such issues with communication tools, and leveraging the internet, there must be so many more out there in a similar position. So I went online. And that's when I got sucked down the rabbit hole.

All of the questions that I was interested in, there were people exploring them online. And I was hooked. I needed to talk to them, I needed to meet them. And I did. Between 2011 and 2013 I found my way to many different places, like Copenhagen, London, and all around the US building face to face connections with a community that was clearly operating more and more both online and offline, as a community. I believe this network that grew is somewhat latent today, but that the connections are laying potently waiting for a next large unfolding. Meanwhile, everyone has their localized projects and focus to further.

Ours is Metamaps. Stay tuned for more on that.