This Is Not Medium-Ass Canvas, It’s Big Ass Canvas: A Look Back On Our First Sponsorship

For anyone who wasn’t in Austin to see Big Ass Canvas two weeks ago it was a very cool community experience and, we are proud to say, our first sponsorship opportunity.

When we met creators Zach Horvath and Travis Huse and learned about the idea they were putting together, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to encourage collaboration within the Austin community. The concept is centered around showing people what they can produce together through collaboration, and the execution worked perfectly in that regard. Zach and Travis put the Big Ass Mission best: “Big Ass Canvas is a cooperative art experiment that wants to bring in all the people of Austin…When great people come together with a common goal and a common focus…forget about it. It’s game over.”

On their giant blank canvas, the artistic contributions started out as a smattering of squiggles and doodles and very quickly transformed into a high-quality piece of art, which you can see in the amazing timelapse they put together after the fact.

Big Ass Canvas plans to post up a few more Canvases this month (Big Ass Canvas 2 is this Sunday, May 20th at Peria’s on 1400 S Congress), culminating in an Auction to sell these public works of art and raise funds for Explore Austin, a local non-profit that helps underprivileged kids with education and leadership experiences.

Zach and Travis are truly passionate about the same causes that we are and it was incredibly refreshing and encouraging to not only meet like-minded people, but see the powerful results of that mindset come to life through Big Ass Canvas. We look forward to the next canvas installments . Thanks again to the Big Ass Canvas team for letting us get involved with such a great project!

Do you have good examples of communities coming together or ideas that you think we should get involved in?

An Introduction to OurPangea Part 4 of 4

How Can OurPangea Impact Your Life?

More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness…do not despair… you the people have the power to create happiness, to make this life a wonderful adventure.  Let us use that power to unite.  Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and age a security.

-The Great Dictator, 1940

While OurPangea might have begun for all of us as blind ambition and a desire to make the way we use the Internet better, it has changed into something more significant for myself, Noah, Rick, and our entire team.

In an environment where the idea of a Facebook collapse sounds more than hypothetical and we seem to be closing in on the next great iteration of online change, this might sound counter-intuitive:  OurPangea is not about Facebook.  It is not about Google+, Pinterest or online advertising.  OurPangea is not even only about online networking.  It’s about using the tools we have to improve the world.

OurPangea is about bringing everyone together in one place where we can comfortably and easily share our unique opinions, perspectives and ideas and see how that influences our communities.  It’s about facilitating introductions for powerful collaboration.

I can understand if everything we’ve written sounds naïve and deluded. But this is something I have come to personally believe in strongly and if you’ve met me I hope you agree.   From a more personal perspective, moving around so often isn’t easy.  It’s hard to establish an identify in a new place and even harder when you’re couch-surfing without a home base. There are many times I thought to myself how much easier it would all be if I had a place like OurPangea to understand the people and environment around me without having to literally walk around the city.  It would have made meeting people, finding activities to get involved in, and staying connected to my friends back home quick and painless.

One of the most inspiring speeches I have ever heard was delivered in The Great Dictator.  It inspired me to realize that our dream of unity is not a new one. 70 years ago there were people who believed it.  We are still striving to realize it, and now we have the Internet to focus that dream.  We finally have this great and powerful machine that we can build OurPangea on to create an environment where we can all collaborate and discover why we are important to each other, we finally have the power to realize this dream.

For us it’s no longer a company mission constrained to a company, it is a personal mission.  And we believe in all of us together.

An Introduction to OurPangea Part 3 of 4

Where Want To See The World Go

We started our story with dream to unite the world. The values we are striving to empower users with on OurPangea—community, collaboration, belonging, and ultimately a shared human identity—are building blocks that, when combined we believe will create more meaningful relationships and bring us closer to unity. OurPangea strives to create something that can transcend our online and offline worlds and be a harmonious bridge between them.

We know that a collaborative approach to problem solving—one that involves sharing different perspectives and strategies—often results in a better outcome than from one person with a single perspective and strategy.  We know that our community is everywhere.  We have great ideas that mesh well with the great ideas of others. But without access to or knowledge of those people and ideas, our abilities are limited.

As a human planet, we need a better way to exercise our freedom of expression. And there is no better tool to facilitate that than the Internet. It is a natural drive to be curious about the populations, cultures, and communities around our world.  But looking at unfamiliar cultures from afar doesn’t actually help us understand what it’s like to be within that community.  It’s important to have a better way to use our ability to express our perspectives to help us and others see what it is like to be a member of a different community. Social networks have already made the world smaller. We want to finally have a network to bring humans closer together.

When we have a tool that can help connect people with the understanding that together they can be great and allow us to gain outside perspectives of different cultures and communities we will be taking a step towards realizing the Internet’s true potential and beginning to harness the power of a collective, connected humanity.

In our first article this week, I wrote “Social networking has given us a way to share our lives with our friends and family from anywhere in the world.” We imagine a world where that is taken further.  We want that statement to read “Community Networking has given us a way to live our lives with anyone, anywhere.”

An Introduction to OurPangea Part 2 of 4

What OurPangea Is Doing

Connection is great.  No one wants to be isolated. Through connection social networks have comforted us all against the idea that we’re alone in the world. However, being connected online doesn’t necessarily translate into a sense of connectedness. This connection doesn’t mean “having access to everyone in my network,” “interacting in a meaningful way,” or even “sharing with everyone.” Unfortunately, connection as utilized on social networks is all about numbers.  It’s a quantifiable measure of how many people you are “connected” to. There’s no way to define being connected via social networks besides the word connection.

OurPangea is introducing a new, community-centric approach to networking to make our connections more quality based by answering the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ behind our online connections. That is, how are we connected to these people and why is that important to us? OurPangea is making our connections more relevant to all of us by framing them around the interests we have and the locations of our groups and communities.

In the past weeks we have pointed out a number of disagreements with social networking, mainly:

• Social networking is passive, which means it is not built to facilitate creating relationships outside of our existing circles (reactive networking model).
• Relationships and connections are oversimplified and one-dimensional, which is not a true representation of how we interact with the people in our lives.
• Popular social networking sites are beginning to value company growth and profitability over user-experience leading to a decrease in on-site engagement and an overall worse experience.

Because of this, we are collectively realizing that connection itself can only take us so far, and there’s no greater demonstration of this than the fact Facebook is larger and can connect more people than anything in history but that hasn’t made it better. In fact, people seem more willing than ever to leave the social networking site. So if connection doesn’t make our online experience better, what will?  And how do we get there? If today’s social networks connect us, the next step is gaining a sense of connectedness and community from our networks.

So we’re building a Community Network.  This type of network is proactive to make creating new relationships and engaging old ones easy.  It uses semantic connections for a better way to discover people and groups and remind us why those relationships are important to us.  And it will unite the world.

How? If social networking has connected us, then Community Networking will help us understand how we are connected to each other and why that connection is important.  It does this by organizing users by their location and their interests.  People will not only see how their existing relationships are valuable, but also be able to envision what relationships could be valuable that are outside of their networks.  So our networks will start to grow along with the benefits we bring, which will spread from person to person and community to community.

The Community Network is more accurate of the complexities of our real life relationships and groups and it’s designed to be a more fulfilling online representation of those interactions. In short, a Community Network is built to create a sense of community and belonging by enabling us to more easily discover, collaborate with, and engage the people and groups around us.