tech, ethics and consciousness...for all life
ParTecK seed grants have been offered since 2017 as a way to support members of our community with developing ideas and projects that might otherwise sit on the side of their desks. Our process has evolved from simply awarding funding towards a more supportive framework for grantees. This includes a mastermind group all grantees are asked to attend on a monthly basis. These groups are a fertile space for synergies and mutual support over the course of the year. Our newest step is to offer a mini-incubator to support proposal development. Check out our incubator page for some orienting ideas.
Project Hyphae is a pilot project by Thaumazo that aims to foster citizen engagement through an innovative approach to self-organizing, task-oriented groups. The project aims to build a flexible, inclusive and diverse community that will create, implement and document projects aimed at improving the world within the UN SDG framework. This is the first time the Unmanagement methodology is being used in this context, making it a unique and exciting opportunity for community members to gain new skills, grow their support network, and make a positive impact in their community. Thaumazo is grateful to ParTecK for support for this innovative project and its efforts to create a more thriving world for all.
All Sky, Mirror Ocean: A Healing Manifesto is a critical memoir and artist book exploring my lived experience of bipolar disorder, childhood trauma, and healing. It weaves and knots these stories with the illness communities I conducted my doctoral research in psychiatry with: Inuit suicide survivors in the arctic, cancer patients, and psychiatric inpatients. It is a compassionate and vulnerable account of suffering and the peace, acceptance, connection, and happiness that can bloom while healing: an authentic spiritual journey. It is grounded in Buddhist philosophy, psychedelic studies, altered states of visionary consciousness, and the perennial philosophies that bind them. With this grant, I aim to develop supplementary content for web3 creation and dissemination.
Purpose: Engage & empower youth, their teachers, parents and caregivers - through the development of a game play format - to observe, understand, and question the technologies that have become insidious in our current lifestyles and learning environments. Having researched in the space of online safety and privacy for youth has brought me to the place of wanting to create a tool in the form of a game. This game could be used by families, teachers, youth leaders etc. to engage with youth on the topic of online safety and privacy, and the ethics involved. This tool would be based in making a space for youth to connect in real life how technology is affecting their lives, and how they can affect technology, and the consciousness that plays out in these spaces. I would love for this game to also encourage youth to seek out ways to engage and create technology that serves the best in humanity. I would like to build into the game integral theory consciousness and decentralization theme and ideas.
This project is intended to build a community that would help people regenerate their wholeness, including body, psyche, brain and spirit. It draws upon Victoria's knowledge of regenerative health (based on neuropsychosmatics), embodiment practices, emotional intellect practices, awareness practices, integral meditation and integral psychology knowledge. Art created with AI will also be incorporated for inspiration.This would be offered to both English and Ukrainian speaking audiences. http://victoria-savostianova.com/
Addressing climate change, like addressing any important global issue, is not only a matter of technological and infrastructure solutions but it requires cultural transformation – the changing of bodies, minds, and hearts to engender the motivation to act, the understanding of potential impact, and the wisdom to exist as a living embodiment of that change.The first step in that cultural transformation is to understand where people reside in their worldviews, value systems, and meaning-making frames, so that they may receive the proper invitation into something greater. Our proposal is to develop tools and pilot the technology for a human capacity assessment system to better understand how people are making meaning, so that education and motivational messaging will better meet them where they are. This technology is designed to enhance many other climate action projects by boosting the effectiveness of invitations and interventions through cognitive developmental science.
More descriptions to come
Web3 technologies have emerged as a response to web2 technology, which sought to centralize internet use data and make it easier for internet users to set up accounts and share information with other accounts. In a short time, web2 socialized the web, but it also undermined civil discourse. Web3 contains the seeds to fundamentally reorganize power on the internet and to restore elements of civil society that have profoundly deteriorated under web2.
My aim is to create and publish meaningful, truthful, and ethical content that explores how emerging technologies and institutions can enable new possibilities in civic life. And I aim to do this using new web3 technology, which promises to reshape how we organize at the highest and deepest levels of civic life.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) live on a blockchain but they don’t follow the same rules as cryptocurrencies. Controlling the key is only part of owning an NFT. NFTs typically link to media stored off-chain. If the server hosting the media goes down, you still control the token containing the link, but the media you thought you owned is gone.
Cryptovandals takes an NFT you own, saves the content to IPFS, then mints a new NFT linking to the content on IPFS and burns the original NFT. The new NFT contains the provenance of the original but is stripped of proprietary links - a truly open NFT. You can try Cryptovandals at cryptovandals.com, see our NFT Hack presentation, or view the code.
Civilizational threats like ecological collapse, rampant inequality, and exponential technology require significant innovations in collective intelligence design. If we want a future that isn’t total chaos or authoritarianism, democratic societies will need to reimagine what it means for a government to be “of the people, by the people, for the people'' in the age of information technology. How could we design digital technologies that enable deeply enriching experiences and support a collective intelligence fit for a long term, sustainable civilization? I believe we can design such humane technologies; tools which promote individual and collective wisdom, create trustworthy, community educational resources, and guide effective and ethical civic inquiry.
In this project I am committing to facilitating a ParTecK community learning experience (seminar style involving minimal presentation with lots of open dialogue) on the basis of intensive research into:
Thaumazo is a soon-to-launch Non-Profit based on principles of Unmanagement that brings self-organized groups to bear to find and tackle inflection points on global issues. Thaumazo’s mission is to provide support to people passionate about working to make the world better - in their personal growth, their professional skills, experience and network, and their projects and opportunities to creatively bring their passion to bear on practical work in the world. Our work is to make it ever easier for people of any age, background, skillset and domain of interest to work successfully and in the way they choose to improve their world. This mission is accomplished through resources, community, partnerships and projects.
The intention of this grant is to provide the core team sufficient operating costs to launch the non-profit, including stipend to develop database / dataviz structure, documentation approach ( to ensure all learnings are captured and shared, which is critical for an Unmanagement / emergent venture), to create the seed group of global partners and to spark the initial invitations and project
cohorts.
In response to the world situation we are in, we need to become something we’ve never been before, and for that we need abductive processes. Warm Data Labs (WDL) and PNP (People Need People (PNP) are two of those. As trained hosts, Rochelle and Roberta seek to offer WDL/PNP sessions to the Parteck community, and explore deepening the field of our relationships while also extending them to other communities. And to discover what happens when we do this.
Warm Data Labs and their online version, People Need People, are, in Nora’s words: designed to address the fractures steeped into the way the many contexts of day-to-day life overlap. Economy, culture, family, education, politics, technology—these things interweave into identity, goals, dreams, and unspoken assumptions about life. Warm Data is an offering to the communities that invites transcontextual sense-making, at very personal, and, simultaneously, societal levels.