Our mission is “to make technology that changes how it feels to be alive”. Here we describe how we’ll do that. Mainly, we’re bringing new opportunities for teamwork, community, and adventure to everyone who wants them.
Here we break these changes into five categories.
In recent years, virtual community has gotten easier than physical community. Television and computer games provide expertly designed entertainment and pleasure… but when we have to deal with our real lives, we’re all alone. When will participating in the real world and dealing with real issues be just as adventurous, easy, collaborative, and fun?
We want seeing people in real life to rival instant messaging or facebook in ease-of-use. We seek to bring entertainment and interaction out of the virtual worlds, out of the living rooms and isolated spaces, and into the participatory, convivial, public spaces of flesh, blood, and laughter.
Our definition of community is actual people, in vicinity to one another, thinking about each others’ needs, and helping each other, in person and on the ground. We want to see a decrease in loneliness, helplessness, isolation, and needless expense across America and across the world. We want an increase of enjoyment, adventure, conviviality, sharing, and mutual support.
We seek to assist the human desires to be available for one another, to be good to one another, to rejoice in one another, to make good use of our ecological and social resources, and to engage with life in ways that are real, deep, and unpredictable.
Real-world involvement. Actual flesh and dirt, the street, the stop signs, the cars, the people, the goats and the trees.
Our principle tactic in building all this is to find ways to make real-world engagement and in-person involvement more fun, more adventurous, and just as easy as sitting around at home.
One of the ideas behind groundcrew is that we don’t do enough for each other: that is, people would be happier we each had a team which would do our bidding, and we would happily participate in other people’s teams for the chance. Ideally these teams would consist of both agents on the ground, ready to do real-world physical tasks wherever you need them done, and also others, dispatchers, working to coordinate those people such that your dreams come true. The reason we don’t already make these teams for one another is because the coordination cost is too high: we don’t even know when we could be available to one another, and it’s too much of a pain to organize your team, to coordinate their actions, etc.
By coordinating the joining and summoning of personal squads, as well as the construction of larger project-based teams, and through facilitating the exchange of assignments and wishes among people, Groundcrew is about making this kind of mutual support as easy as possible. We’re creating the social and technological structures so that we each get the right amount of support—so that we are available to one another much more than we are now.
The market is rich with opportunities for branded fun, broadcast fun, and virtual fun. We want to use the same communications media to support D-I-Y fun and physical/actual fun. At this moment in history, it has become easier to join Second Life or to watch a television show than it is to Get a First Life and find people to play with outside. We support the development of technology to support the latter experience, to make DIY fun just as easy and mainstream. We want organizing and playing in the real world to become unprecedentedly easy and widespread.
In fact, we want a level of intrigue and adventure in the world’s cities ABOVE AND BEYOND the level of intrigue or adventure that you’ll find in the Sims, in Second Life, or in World of Warcraft. Bring the noise. Bring the fun.
When you are ready for action, Groundcrew lets organizers see your immediate location and availability, and sends assignments directly to your phone. You get to be an agent, like James Bond, receiving live instructions whenever you like.
With Groundcrew, anyone with a dream can be an organizer. As you prove yourself capabale, you can address larger and larger squads, locally and globally. Participants in these actions can enjoy a level of precision coordination and timing, individual connection, and interactivity that is not possible with conventional volunteer coordination technology like walkie-talkies.
What makes for an adventurous life? We think it has something to do with living one’s dreams, with challenges, with mobilizing vast resources, and with encountering new things and finding the support of strangers.
Making life more adventurous means finding those systems and structures which bring out the best in our selves, our societies, and our ecological situation.
It means inviting magic. We want wishes to come true. We want to live our dreams. We want everyone on Earth to live their dreams.
Our every day lives are about balancing many different aims: we want to help out in our community, but we also want to make money to support ourselves and our loved ones better. We want to have fun, but we also want to engage productively with the world.
Groundcrew is about integrating business and fun, business and community, community and fun. We can ask ourselves, across these different areas of life, “What if positive action was the bottom line?” What if all our desires and motivations fit within the same system, and we could move fluidly between them. What about a world where the best comes to those who make the most positive experiences and are of lasting help?
Our goal at Citizen Logistics is to create a world where everyone is available to everyone else, and real-world involvement is less than a click away. Together, we can create a new world order of resource reuse, synchrony, and adventure.
Our technology encourages:
This is the dawn of a new integration: where work is just another scavenger hunt, every day is an adventure, wishes come true, and no one is stuck alone in their house. Summon your squad.
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