Endemic
How do we organize talent for fitness, embolden their unique journey, and increase the potential for bottom up innovation and insights? We support R&D for technical infrastructure and learning sciences that creates the basis for broad and local collective intelligence & coordination from the surfacing and cultivation of resources, capacity, and desires to the restructuring of how economies optimize for highest order goals locally and across values-aligned networks.
An Operating System for Collective Intelligence
Endemic is conducting research and development, field building, and standards advocacy for learning sciences and technical tools that integrate into the background of individuals and communities daily lives, supporting them with actionable insights about their opportunities for growth and civic contribution personalized to them.
Our research is contextualized for application across interoperable technical components that together form an operating system optimizing for the harmonization and deepening of three goals, all of which are both ends in themselves and mutually reinforce each other: individual growth, community development, and coordination.
This OS is driven by a unified backend synthesis of diverse data about the state of the community, it’s resource needs, individuals and their capacities, and opportunities for innovation or maturation. This stack will integrate embedded assessments, automated but interpretable analysis, and contextualized suggestions for action that generally empower human choice over machine decision making and surface opportunities to heal alienating splits in our cultures and societies. If you’d like to share your R&D or explore our work more, please reach out.
Individual Growth
To popularize paths of lifelong learning alternative to traditional education it will require new learning standards and interventions with measurable impacts. Our focus on insight generation is valuable not only to influence the practice of legacy institutions but also as a reflective tool for people who are committed to non-standard definitions of success for their lives.
We use the latest principles from cognitive science and adult developmental theory to implement innovative learning experiences and assessment methods that coordinate multiple layers of the psyche integrating primal human drives, embodied sensory, emotional and physical intelligences, social/relational interaction, cognitive skill building, meta-cognitive reflection and self-knowledge, collaborative community-making, and spiritual presence. In synthesizing these fields into highly responsive assessments, we can drive and publish breakthroughs understanding and measuring wisdom cultivation and it’s impact in the world.
We leverage these capacities to support individuals to understand stepwise opportunities that feel highly relevant and motivating to support their healing, maturation, character growth, and skill development, all aligned with their interests and goals and embedded in their contributions to the community. Individuals will receive suggestions from a “personalized digital assistant”, embedded into whichever digital tool they most interact with to encourage activity planning that supports them.
Community Development
To understand the opportunities and transformations of our communities, we are developing Community Depth Assessments which support communities to clarify their goals and values, surface the needs and opportunities of a community, and support in developing an actionable plan for community maturation. The assessment are used iteratively both by leaders of communities and by community members to surface insights to improve economic and physical security, cultural, material, and economic innovation, environmental and human wellbeing, and population growth (where appropriate) in line with each communities unique values and purpose.
By synthesizing research across indigenous sciences, social sciences, ethics, material sciences, civics, and behavioral sciences, we begin to develop embodied insights for for what needs to be true and what opportunities we have available to increase the richness and reverence for the places and communities we inhabit.
Coordination
By combining individual capacity assessments and community depth assessments, our unique relevance engine will offer customized learning paths based on members capacities, interests, and community needs and opportunities. This way, Endemic can recruit, train, and route motivated individuals who are already aligned with learning opportunities, communities, projects, and collaborations where they can make the greatest contributions.
At the highest level, our goal is to innovate in the definition and design of currency mechanisms that represent, reward, and empower action aligned with supporting individuals and communities to cultivate more meaningful, connected, and sovereign life. We’re developing an “economic model” that goes beyond Gross Domestic Product to prioritize cultures over markets and reveals that "money" is not a single, fixed concept.
Through further developing the fields of collaboration science, extrinsic motivation psychology, economics, social design, metaphysics, ownership structuring, rights, governance, and policy, we can better investigate the right relationship between: Environment & Learning, Wildness & Domestic Life, Civics & Belonging, Technology & Humanity, Technology & Nature, Humanity & Nature, Family & Community, and Spiritual & Material worlds.
( Re )imagining Education for 21st Century Communities
For more on our prototype individual embedded assessments read our Project Report: Reimagining Education for 21st century communities focused on an innovative immersive digital course called Fire that we developed. The course integrates narrative audio, artistic video, embedded reflective formative assessments, facilitated movement practice, meditation, daily journaling, and a guided ritual all to support increasing clarity of purpose and depth of commitment. This report reviews our approach to wisdom education, our design principals, our assessment method, questions and analysis, and our learning theory principals.
Project Report 01What does it look like to design our societies such that the most aligned talent wants to contribute to the creation and expansion of their neighborhoods, towns, and cities? We support the development of complex and connected regions ranging from meshed networks of values-aligned collaborators to integrated villages that thousands of people call home.
Belonging to Place
At the smallest level, we are working to renew the capacity of cultures to be sensitive to their place and reconnect with their natural intelligences. At the largest level, we are advocating for a transformation in cultures' sensitivity to their vision and the ways in which their contributions foster more sacred societies. By integrating these two perspectives, we facilitate both individual and collective growth to rejuvenate local cultures that can establish the necessary structures to enhance and reinforce a communities’ sovereignty, connectedness, and quality.
This ideal leads to educational, dignified, creative, and powerful daily lives for community members. Communities flourish, becoming abundant, strong, and deeply fulfilling with stories of connection among its people, material objects, and the surrounding environment. Each interaction contributes a unique part to shared goals, and even challenges are seen as beautiful opportunities.
Maturing Communities
Endemic brings together specialized professionals to help communities plan, develop, and manage critical components of community growth. We offer support throughout the entire process, including assessing the opportunities in the local environment, recruiting community members and leaders, and the ongoing implementation of basic infrastructure and new industries. Our support is guided by our principles for creating more sacred lifestyles and evaluating how choices in one area impact all other areas. When Endemic supports whole community development we begin with a series of assessments that help us and the communities understand their opportunities and constraints. When we support with a narrower aspect of development we tailor the assessment to those goals.
- We assess the local environment to determine what material resources are locally available, what activities would support the ecology’s sustainability and renewal, and the opportunities for growing community in mutuality with the environment.
- We assess the existing and intended community members’ capacities in order to design industries, health initiatives, and governance processes that match the needs and capabilities of the community.
- We assess the local zoning and development plans, the development plans of nearby communities, and the tax laws of relevant jurisdictions to understand how to optimize community development and opportunities for partnerships.
- Finally, we assess the long term collective goals of the existing and intended community members to define a unique purpose and story that attracts the most aligned people and gives shape to the community’s long term activities.
After these assessments we lead iterative design phases that result in a holistic development plan that expresses the unique potential and collective goals of the community integrated into its environment and aligned with our worldview and ethical principles. In larger, already mature communities, Endemic may support more focused community development, only addressing one or a few of the following aspects of community life.
Universal Components of Community
Collective Potential
Community leaders are often visionaries who are practical enough to understand that choices about community development have complex, cascading impacts. Community design begins by considering the fundamental intentions and key structures that will impact all future decision-making, and the best results come from the participation of all members to discover how to accomplish shared goals in such a way that each step reinforces the experience of the community’s vision in every moment.
Community Purpose
Derived from the capacities and values of its members, as well as the opportunities presented in its environment, a communities’ purpose clarifies what makes a community unique, coherent, and attractive and how various people, industries, and innovations contribute to it.
Legal and Economic Model
Defining capital flows, investments, and legal structures across community commons, private property, public goods and services, industry operations, and individual member wealth management, rights, and access to support the long-term motivation and commitments of community members and safeguard the evolution of the community as a whole.
Sense Making
When done well, the process of governance and foreign policy will lead to opportunities for innovation and community development, but progress needs to be considered iteratively in relationship with the community’s unique and evolving purpose. Systems that inspire participation and care and integrate all community members, their desires, and perspectives will lead to massive opportunities, efficiencies, and innovation.
Governance
Ideal governance practices simultaneously integrate and deepen the participants' values in alignment with the community's purpose, includes multiple iterations and methods for sensemaking and decision making appropriate to the application, supports people’s education and maturation through participating, and increases community connection.
Foreign Policy
Principals and initiatives set by a community for appropriate engagement with outside individuals, organizations, and other communities including import/export, information exchange, partnerships, recruitment, and holistic defense (economic, digital, legal, and physical).
Cultural and Material Sustainability
Tradespeople hone a specific craft that brings their care and beauty into the world, taking responsibility for making, healing, building, teaching, sustaining, etc. While there are likely thousands of variations of vocational skills, they largely can be categorized across four components that are universal to any growing community.
Food and Water Production
From sowing seeds to cooking meals for dozens to hundreds regularly; resilient, nutritious, and delicious food and water systems, integrated with the cultivation of wild and natural ecosystems, form the basis for a thriving community.
Material Culture
Local resource development ranging from small-scale crafts like pottery to building construction, tool procurement, maintenance, and materials innovation. Material industries are best done by cultivating a deep awareness of their environments, such that they bring the local raw material world more alive in human experience.
Healthcare
Healthcare is a design consideration in all other aspects of community so that they support active lifestyles, easy access to nature, water, food, and good friends. Communities grow increasingly vital by integrating the insights of healing practitioners into all aspects of community development. From physical to psychological, chronic to acute, childbirth to elderly care, much can be improved through whole lifestyle design and personalized healthcare infrastructure that is conscientious to the unique needs and goals of the whole community.
Infrastructure & Design
When cultivating a deep sensitivity to place, the human-built world has the potential to support ecological and human health, strengthen community culture, improve social cohesion, and provide a sense of belonging, from landscape architecture, data systems, community utilities, common spaces, our homes, etc.
Foundational to all components and reinforced by each other are Education and Cultural Rituals. These are the both the source and the result of the deepest intention of all community activity, and happen both organically and purposefully. They are expressed in the care, potency, and responsibility of both daily activities and special celebrations.
Education
True education is the renewal and evolution of a community’s holistic culture aligned with increasingly fulfilling both individuals’ and the community’s potential. Education includes all aspects of physical, social, emotional, and spiritual development. It is entwined with story, action, and reflection, on both the personal and collective levels.
Cultural Rituals
Seasonal and daily cultural rituals, artistic expression, and rhythms that align with the cycles of nature and human maturation can foster a deeper appreciation for the sanctity of life within a community. These practices also provide support for community members to process pain, cultivate courage, and create a unique expression of their collective identity.
Ideally living in community feels deeply educational and spiritually vibrant every day. At its core, every healthy community is a learning community that builds educational pathways connected to its unique place and purpose.
Endemic
From the wide education of the “( Re )enchantment, srsly” brand and platform, to the community Operating System R&D work, to the concrete design, development, recruiting and strategic resourcing work of our development services, all of Endemic’s work supports the growth of rich and vibrant communities integrated with their environments.
Mapping the Movement
Endemic is working to profile and map communities that are a part of our movement, to do this we are developing formative assessments that represent the needs, opportunities, values, goals, culture, demographics, geography, models, and overall opportunity for quality of life…If you are already a community or working on a community project that has a vision to become village scale (150+ full time members) or to be networked in a region with complimentary community you can fill out this baseline form and we will reach out to candidates that are a good prototype partner.
Join the movementWhat talent do we need to revitalize our towns and cities? How do we cultivate skills such that they enrich culture, connection, and resilience simultaneously? We’re building educational pathways that make it increasingly easy, obvious, and more fulfilling to make harder, deeper, higher quality choices that aligns communities with their place and have the power to generate new ways of being human together embedded in novel, connected societies.
A Community Worldbuilding Platform
Societies are always evolving. Many are getting more alienated and more controlled, new cities continue to be built, leaders leverage the ‘good’ to avoid the hard problems and responsibility necessary to generate embodied, more alive outcomes that prioritize culture over markets. Our current growth paradigms perpetuate relatively crude, alienating outcomes and uncoordinated, conflicted goals. It’s hard to know how to become the people who can participate in creating more beautiful worlds under these conditions. There is massive latent energy in our cultures wanting to be activated.
Some people call our moment "The Great Turning", "The Transition" or "The Time Between Worlds" often suggesting that we have little agency to steer the outcome and continues to alienate us from how we participate.
We advocate for and empower cultures to facilitate as harmonious of a transition as possible and to steward communities that can contribute to the renewal of a healthier societies. The process that we are in together is called ( Re )enchantment, srsly.
Worldview
We are dedicated to discovering and communicating diverse visions for the future and empowering individuals, families, communities, and leaders to participate in making them real.
Unfortunately, at all levels, there is a lack of accessible, holistic vision. Continuing on with business as usual just reinforces what mostly drives culture already: technological utopianism, environmental doom, extractive consumerism, and political and economic disempowerment. These all come from the feeling of ongoing crisis, disempowered communities, and broadly depend on ‘someone else’ to do something. We are missing opportunities for empowered participation to generate new cultures.
We work with community builders, regional planners, educators, scientists, government officials, infrastructure developers, industry leaders, and other experts to facilitate conversations that move from vision to strategy and capacity building. Our goal is to develop a culture of humble confidence, commitment, and empowered care towards societal renewal.
Principles
All of our efforts encourage the development of the same three principles in individuals, families, or communities. Together these guide maturation in all facets of life in community in a healthy and balanced way.
/the diversity of our available choices
Connectedness is the feeling of the rich interweavings between ourselves and all our relations. It is the foundation for the sense of belonging and sustainability. It is what transforms a place into a home and what makes our work meaningful. Today, the ties that bind us to our families, communities, and environments are weakening everywhere. We help people rediscover the stories of their past and commit to local mutual partnerships to rebuild the feeling of connection. We do this by demonstrating how to rebuild strong relationships with everything around us and how to care for and give back to the environments from which we harvest to create our lives.
/the ability to choose
Sovereignty is the freedom to innovate and be creative. It opens us to new unexpected possibilities. We understand that many people are limited in their options for how to live or what to work on. We aim to help people create more meaningful opportunities, develop confidence in their ability to navigate their choices effectively, and grow the courage and strength of will to make the best decisions even in difficult circumstances. With communities we promote ongoing innovation, the creation of new industries and social support systems, and the capacity for self-determination in order to achieve a common purpose.
/the impact of our choices
Quality is the degree to which we take responsibility for our actions and their impacts. It is an expression of love and dignity, and we can always strive to care more, regardless of the complexity of our responsibilities. Quality is the outcome of balancing sovereignty and connectedness so that individual and community development happen in integrity. We encourage individuals and communities to reflect on what they already care about, and support them to build more capacity for care and sensitivity.
Wisdom Skills
Wisdom is the heart of individual and collective flourishing. As one gets wiser, over time one increasingly appreciates the beauty of the world and how much of a gift it is, and becomes increasingly motivated to work to make this experience more available for others.
The more one becomes wise the more capacity on has to synthesize information from all sources and generate a strategic, holistic response. Over time one gets better at doing this both more comprehensively and more quickly, which leads to being better able to contribute to the flourishing of more and more beings. This can be trained through practice. Though by no means guaranteeing that one will act perfectly ethically - there is always room to improve - practices that increase an individual's wisdom are the foundation for an ethical culture at all levels of activity.
Wisdom Experiences
Noticing, embracing, and releasing resistance to all aspects of any given experience.
Opening the aperture and heightening the detail of one's experience to let in more emotional, somatic, intuitive, and cognitive information.
Noticing, embracing, and releasing resistance to all aspects of any given experience.
Internally, training to clarify the hierarchy and relationships between one's desires and to maintain consistency in this hierarchy over time, which enables communication of these desires more clearly, leading to more effective action and greater trust in oneself and from others.
In alignment with one’s clarity, following through on what one has identified as yours to do in every moment. It’s important to recognize range of valid choices here. Depending on the circumstance both asking for support and supporting others to do what is theirs to do could be the aligned action. Likewise choosing an immediately pleasurable action and choosing something that makes things harder in the near term but more graceful in the future. This experience especially involves increasing courage.
Our Core Intelligences
How do we learn to belong to our context and be held by them?
How do we develop and integrate our intuition more deeply?
How do we create from our deepest desire?
How do we develop the clarity and courage to recognize our capacity to love?
How do we cultivate livelihoods to to support sacred community
Vocational Skills
Endemic provides vocational education that promotes sovereignty, connectedness, and quality - in short, education that rebuilds culture. Our vocational skills range from community scale craftsmanship and services to industrial manufacturing and goods creation. Unfortunately, many of these skills have been outsourced, centralized, automated, and commodified to a greater degree than ever before. This has come at a great cost to the meaningfulness of our relationships with the external world, our environments everywhere, and our resilience to industrial disruptions. Fewer people possess the skills and tools necessary to practice less automated and holistic forms of industrial production and services.
In response, we are building specific vocational education pathways that aim to generate a high quality lifestyle, sustainability, and innovation in diverse communities. We curate and create foundational and advanced training programs, both online and in-person, including apprenticeships, placements in organizations, communities, and localized marketplaces. We collaborate with instructors who share our principles and have a deep connection with their crafts, are sensing into the future of their trade, and can blend in-depth skill building with the cultivation of wisdom.
There are many vocations that can contribute to creating increasingly sacred communities. Endemic advocates for vocations that embody the following principles as much as possible:
• avoid moving materials from their origins,
• record the contextualization of materials,
• transform materials in ways that can be returned to raw states, can be regenerated, or be up-cycled
• prioritize cultivating complex life over accumulating simplified things
When appropriate, Endemic facilitates the strengthening of local vocational culture by supporting the establishment of robust and complex maker-spaces that reduce the cost of tooling and supports material sourcing and recycling across industries. In certain cases, we also aid in the implementation of community-wide economic models that support craft industries that significantly enrich culture and supports local community. Regardless of the role, Endemic's vocational pathways are designed to instill a sense of dignity that enables learners to fully appreciate the importance, value, and meaningfulness of vocational skills and re-localization.
( Re )enchantment, srsly launches 2024.
Our platform will integrate with peoples daily lives surfacing opportunities for education, localized civic and community learning and engagement, personalized growth and healing opportunities, and meaningful collaborations that together set cultures on a path to revitalize society.
We are currently storytelling some of the world's best tradespeople who hold a deep respect for skills that enrich culture and community. Alongside these tradespeople, we develop apprentice programs to preserve and advance these crafts for communities everywhere.
As we continue to build technical infrastructure, we are designing programming that addresses some of our biggest outstanding questions. This programming is not currently marketed and we are curating attendance. In basic terms the programs may include topics like; “how do we reimagine money in an age that we can track and coordinate village-scale values, characteristics, and desires?”, “what comes after the internet?”, “What needs to be true for community to better facilitate a healthy relationship between pain and pleasure that reduces trauma and enhances character?”, etc...
If you’ve read this far, we will likely be developing something that interests you. Please tell us a bit about yourself so that we can reach out when we have relevant programming for you.