The Rise of Cities

A city, full of lights and history and splendor, often acts as the hub for life. Whether they are world-lifting megalopolises such as the mighty Chicago, or deeply-rooted hyperlocal sanctums like OurPangea’s very own Austin, cities provide the essential focus for living in our modern age. We live, learn, work, play, and create our future in these whirlwinds of activity and humanity. They form the basis of tightly-knit communities and are the outgrowth of centuries of human progress since time immemorial. Young people flock to cities to begin their adult lives, and return their contributions to the rest of society.

America’s growth as a nation can be directly tied to its cities. According to the 1790 census, 95 percent of the people lived in the countryside, and most of the rest were in small villages. The mid-1800s brought rapid growth for industry and ushered in the era of modern cities dotting the Northeastern seaboard, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that urban populations outnumbered rural ones. These days almost all Americans live in cities from Helena to Houston, Portland to Providence, San Francisco to San Angelo, scattered all across the country.

Cities foster the connections of neighborhoods and districts both in cities of millions or a few hundred, creating a sense of community broader than that of family and deeper than that of nation. People come together to define the city’s community with diversity and familiarity in ways that other interactions can never quite compare to.

This is why OurPangea’s goal is to provide a comprehensive community network for a city. We want to take advantage of the community archetype that a city offers and be able to use it to connect people to themselves and each other in ways that have never been done before online. We will create our global city and our local city together, bringing youth and experience, novelty and tradition, and collaboration together to create a hub for life like the cities we love.

The Power of Collaboration

Sometimes it’s hard to visualize how collaboration and teamwork actually impact the things we do.  When we bring up ‘collaboration’ what probably comes to mind for most of us are our experiences on sports teams or working with groups on school projects.  Those are all good examples of positive group-think, but that’s not exactly the essence of our message when talk about the power of collaboration.  To us, collaborating doesn’t just mean working together.  It means working towards something more, something that is unattainable by ourselves.  We want everyone to realize they have the potential to create change.   Through collaboration we can bring our greatest ideas to life and make things better.

Some years ago there was a study on the effects of teamwork on IQ testing. The experiment had teams of four people take IQ tests and analyzed their scores as a group versus their individual results. In every case the teams scored at genius-level, which was higher than any of the participants could rank individually. These results hint that when we have access to collective knowledge and experience we do better than when we’re by ourselves.  It implies that we are better when we work together.

We live in a world today where anything seems possible.  New space-age gadgets and technology are announced everyday.  Our access to the world around us is expanding exponentially. We’ve created an unimaginably powerful tool to spread ideas and perpetuate innovation: the Internet.

Pictured: World Changers

And in truth, anything is possible today.  With so many resources at our disposal, four people can do more than score high on an IQ test.  Four people in one room can change the world. 

At its core, OurPangea is about providing a more painless way to collaborate.  The network itself is simply a framework to make finding the people and groups you can work together with easier. There are no limits and restrictions to how we can interact with it.

OurPangea can be used however you want, but our hope is that it will lead us all to collaborate because it makes it easier. We’d like to see OurPangea used as a window to a world of collaboration that you didn’t have before because it was too hard to find.