Connor Turland+App1

During late April of 2012, I landed in Europe for the first time. Copenhagen, Denmark, specifically. I spent ten days there studying museums with other students from my post-secondary program, Knowledge Integration. But that wasn’t the pivotal experience. That came AFTER most students flew home to Canada on May 6^th. I, on the other hand, left for London, UK. Forget travelling and flying alone in Europe as being daunting, I was going to meet George Por, Helene Finidori and others; few people in the world whom I admire more. A spontaneous, short term collaboration had been planned for my 14 days in London, in which I would offer my support in whatever ways I could to the massive 12 seminars in 12 days sprint with James Quilligan on the Commons and all kinds of surrounding topics. Forget the details of it, amazing as they were, what blew me away was the experience that I had of being so welcome in a ‘strangers’ home and in a ‘strange’ country, given how our deepest dreams and desires for the planet, humanity, community, and ourselves resonated so deeply. It is in a moment, or experience, like this that one can really feel their humanity. It took over a month and a half of considering my experience in London after I returned to make sense of it enough to begin writing about, and sharing the experience, and to see what place there was for me in furthering the work to restore and global commons and simultaneously shift humanity’s thinking into an updated, more functional, operating system. 

An outside the box thinker

An open-hearted, joyful soul

Minimalist, environmental, conscious, neo?-hippie, musical

Multitalented, quick to learn new skills, proficient in many fields, but rarely an ‘expert’ or with great ‘depth’ of knowledge

Quick to shift focus and priority

Thought provoking/‘deep’

Occupied

Experience in group collaboration, facilitation, group process, and conflict resolution

An accumulation of enough knowledge to begin to know just how much there is that I don’t know

A sense of humour, liveliness, and sociability

Patience, yet urgency

Direction and drive

 To lay the foundations for myself, and others, to be rid of the constraints that stop us from doing what’s simultaneously good for us and the world. To spend time empowered in the feeling that I’m doing work that is what I was called to do, while others around me are doing the same thing. And that in doing so, we’re making it more possible for more people to join us. I’m a game-ready infinite player that wants nothing more than to play the infinite game. I see a huge opportunity to do so with the Labs.

In particular, there are members of the Source Team that it would delight me incredibly to work with, and gather deeper understanding of, and connection with. 

There was a time not too long ago this year that my older brother went through a period of intense psychosis. I believe that during this time, I had an experience of one of the great barriers to communication, an amplified scenario of two people holding and understanding two very different realities. I found myself, at first, entirely lacking the skills to communicate with him, in the place where he was at. However, with a little bit of time, I began to explore what reality might be like from his perspective, and found that we began sharing interesting, fun, and profound experiences. This ability to join someone where they're at (in more subtle ways than my extreme experience with my brother), while still maintaining yourself and your realities in the background is a very powerful tool for communication, with which you can overcome significant barriers, and have very connective experiences! Since then, things have shaped up significantly and I would feel perfectly comfortable with a call to my brother :)

Over time, I noticed the 'work yourself to death' climate at University beginning to get to me. I didn't wait long to act and reduced my courseload, and while continuing to take some classes, began to see more clearly the negative impacts that fell on other students who stayed in full time classes. When the right time arose, namely January 2012, I began with my colleague Benjamin Carr what came to be known as SHIFT, a weekly meeting on Wednesday nights that provided a place of lively participative discussion, adventuring, risk-taking, creative thinking and more.  We consistently designed and facilitated these sessions, which proved to be incredibly rewarding for both us, and other participants. In this case, I identified a need which mattered to me, a gaping whole in the lives of students for meaningful discussion and connection, and produced the necessary results consistently to make a small iterative first approach, all generated from a place of internal motivation. 

I am already doing a large amount to usher in and welcome a new creative economy.  I live in a community centred intentional household in Waterloo that shares the primary focus of doing so.  That said, I am one of the primary individuals within this household and community who maintains such a high degree of outward focus and attention to what is happening for other people and projects with similar goals. I have always found it exciting to be someone who crosses borders and weaves networks. That said, knowing that I have this creative home base, I am committed to bringing the learning that we are doing here into other networks and groups of changemakers, and also bringing back learning from those places to here, because I think this is part of the larger pattern of how a new creative economy will come about.  In general, my life goals include playing my part (and making it as big as I can!) in changing the course of humanitys flow, towards the realization of what we are seeing it can be, and so, one could call me fickle on this front, perhaps opportunistic, I'm pretty well interested in any new thing that comes flying at me that looks like it has opportunity for high impact, high leverage, game-changing awesomeness. This year has already been a time of great risk taking, and great return! In my personal relationships, my personal development, and so on. I am at a place of huge appetite for more risks, willing to push forward in leaps and bounds!

As much time as I can/makes sense to. While I enjoy programming and development and foresee much time invested in this, I would hugely like to focus on interpersonal connection, team building, and just in general sharing vivacious experiences!  

The development of collaborative infrastructure and resources for CultureCraft, which will become a Waterloo based ‘commons design collective’, a self-organization intended to produce projects and results which support the rolling back of enclosures on commons of all kinds, and a learning-by-doing methodology of upgrading our own human operating systems. This will generate a huge amount of higher order wealth, focusing directly on social capital, intellectual capital, human capital, and ethical capital. 

I would also be working with the School of Commoning remotely to design for a Massive Open Online Course on the commons this fall. 

I have a blogimprov-ed.blogspot.com"> improv-ed.blogspot.com on my own (and in general) human thinking

and a scoop.it on new economics http://www.scoop.it/t/the-new-economist