Dispatch: Making real-world connections
Let’s put communities at the center of our technology-driven world, one story at a time.
This edition announces a new format, a dispatch, designed to inspire and accompany my essays on Innovating Communities. Dispatch editions are communiqués from the front lines: stories of human-centered, community-scale ideas and projects, and the founders and builders making them happen.
To innovate, we must see. We must be present to the world as it is, but also experience it differently. We must imagine a world that reveres human connections: a world of societies, economies, and cultures forged by communities, the places we call home. There, we must come together to pursue opportunities and face challenges, boldly and head on, with local solutions to better our shared fate. We must use digital technologies, data, and artificial intelligence deployed not for transforming civilization, but for energizing hope in every neighborhood, town, and city.
Why? Because this is the future we want—a built future, built by people and for people.
There are stories to tell, and I will publish them here as momentary glimpses, inconsistent and incomplete by design, but inspiring, too, because that’s how humans create change. I aim to surface works in progress, draw attention, invite conversation, and encourage collaboration, doing what I can—seeing, caring, and writing.
Together, we can develop a new kind of situational awareness, sensing change that we earn, not that is thrust upon us. We must not let AI wash over us, leaving consequences to chance. We can flex our civic muscles, discover possibilities, and nurture local owners and workers, rewarding them with commerce and prosperity.
In coming dispatches, I may write about learning to grow food locally, about skilled work becoming generative rather than extractive, or about replacing global supply chains with locally accountable distribution. I offer waypoints for our journey, expressed in brief reflections of around 300 words.
We are in the fight of our lives, a fight for our lives. Like a war correspondent, I offer communiqués from the front line. In invite you share your experiences, make your arguments, and lend your passions. It’s the human thing to do.
And it’s easy. Just start by leaving a comment below. And stay tuned for my next dispatch!
Together, let’s build thriving communities, one innovation at a time.