Our Mission (Extended)
By Scott Greenwald, PhD
Our mission is to propel experiential technology towards a maximally positive role in society, by supporting a creator-oriented ecosystem, and making ideas for good into reality.
Why Experiential? XR and – more broadly – experiential technology is an immensely important category of new and maturing technologies that will play a central role for the human experience in the near and further future.
Minting creators. A new generation of technology enables us to support creators, not just consumers. We pursue this by building an inclusive community focused on collaboration and hands-on learning.
Ideas for good. Prototyping offers a chance to learn and envision a better future. By centering our ideation processes on this concept, we've seen world-changing ideas emerge.
Making it real. Prototypes are a crucial first step in building ventures that positively impact the world. We leverage our events, resources, and network to support the entire venture creation process, turning ideas into reality.
A future that works for everyone. We believe a better future for humanity must include everyone, and this future can only be achieved if all are involved in its creation. As stewards of access to knowledge and resources, we play a crucial role in counteracting systemic biases that could otherwise prevent people from participating in our events and community, ensuring everyone contributes to building this better future.
What We’ve Set Out to Change
If we look at how mobile internet technologies have developed, from the standpoint of access and economic opportunity, we can see how an ecosystem can be structured to encourage a majority of consumers and a small minority of creators.
Conversely, we believe that creating a vibrant and inclusively beneficial human experience through experiential technology requires applying a paradigm in which everyone is empowered and encouraged to be a creator. The pathway to this form of empowerment is constituted by:
Learning. Learning to use relevant tools and apply relevant concepts, and
Creator enablement network. Gaining access to resources such as a network of potential advisors, collaborators, and sources of funding.
When people are empowered to create in the spirit of making the world a better place, world-changing ideas emerge. It is our mission not only to provide a gateway to the world of creation through experiential technology, but also to provide support for the passage of world-changing ideas from earlier to later stages of development - from conception to impact.
Why Hackathons?
We use the concept of the hackathon– a group event oriented towards creating and/or learning-by-doing over a short period of time–and a collaborative approach to support this passage at many different points, in ways that evolve and grow with a focus on maximizing our impact.
It is important to note that in order to do this, we focus on initiatives that we are uniquely positioned to execute well and it is for this reason that our flagship hackathon format remains our central focus at this time.
A second critical note: we apply the idea of learning-by-doing not only to event participants, but to our organization and its members. That is, many members of our volunteer organization are occupying their role for the first time, effectively learning-by-doing under the guidance of senior members and external mentors. The spirit of collaborative learning is germain to making the world a better place, and this infuses it into everything we do through everyone who is involved.
