In 2009, Erin and I were running Rock 'n Renew — artists and musicians at the center of regional environmental organizations. Permaculture design, rain gardens, campus climate challenges. We partnered with 350.org, NRDC, ran events with Download Festival and Snoop Dogg.
It worked. We helped grow 350.org from 3,000 members at 8 colleges to millions of participants across 189 countries. Part of the single largest day of environmental collective action in history.
Then the scaling question hit. The programs that worked depended on people who just made it work. They couldn't train replacements or hand off the reins. The administrative template we built to capture the model was always incomplete — templates couldn't hold the amount of human innovation, intuition, and local relationship knowledge.
That problem drove the next 15 years of research. The bottleneck was never the database or the front end. It was information capture, storage, and retrieval at the individual knowledge worker level. The conditional logic between value flow channels was invisible to the systems that needed it most.
Today that research is ShurIQ and Totem Protocol. The architecture that makes collective intelligence operational at scale. The same problem, finally matched to the right tools.
Platform Cuts
In 2009, Erin and I were running Rock 'n Renew — artists and musicians powering environmental programs. Permaculture, rain gardens, campus climate challenges. We partnered with 350.org, NRDC, ran events with Download Festival and Snoop Dogg. It worked. 350.org grew from 3,000 members to millions worldwide. Then the scaling question hit. Programs depended on people who just made it work. They couldn't train replacements. Our admin templates couldn't hold the human innovation and relationship knowledge. That bottleneck drove the next 15 years. Today it's ShurIQ and Totem Protocol — the same problem, finally matched to the right architecture. #ThrowbackThursday #CollectiveIntelligence #SystemsDesign
2009: We helped grow 350.org from 3K to millions. The programs worked. But they couldn't scale — templates couldn't hold the human intuition. That bottleneck drove 15 years of research. Today it's ShurIQ.