DESIRES AND CHALLENGES

We live in a beautiful world. A world in which collective effort yielded an uncountable variety of awe-inspiring creations. Collective engineering by over 80 developers created the Gujarat Solar Park, the largest of Asia, preventing 8 million tonnes of CO² being released in the air every year. The collective of farmers exchanging seed varieties creates resilient and nutritional seeds in an ecologically friendly way. Millions of authors created Wikipedia, the most comprehensive encyclopedia to date. More than a 1000 architects and others collaborated to create the Sagrada Familia, considered by many to be among the most inspiring buildings in the world. Collective peaceful resistance, led by Gandhi, overthrew India’s colonial rulers. More than 1000 scientists and engineers from over 100 nations joined forces to create the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine ever built, advancing our understanding of the universe. Through collective music making, symphony orchestras bring Arvo Pärt’s impressive 4th symphony to our ears. Over 4000 open source developers created Linux, which is among the best operating systems in the world. Through crowdsourcing, more than 300.000 amateur planet hunters discovered more planets than ever before. Nanquanu was born from the desire to contribute to the growth of collective creativity. We also live in a world that is highly fragmented. At best, this fragmentation hampers the expression of creativity. At worst, it is highly destructive. Humanity’s almost exclusive focus on a fragment of the ecosystem, human economy, destroys species at an unprecedented rate, and endangers humanity’s own existence. Only a fragment of the human population has access to high-quality education. Most schools, companies and other organisations focus on a fragment of human traits and capabilities, denying those with other gifts to find their natural place. They neglect several traits and capabilities essential for personal and collective well-being. Many people focus on their individual fragment of existence, blind for the negative effects on other people and life forms. In spite of modern communication technology, many valuable insights and discoveries are trapped for a long time in fragments of the community for a long time, before they find their way to others that could benefit from it. Many people only focus on only a fragment of their own being, such as material well-being, career, or amusement, neglecting questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and their place in it, contributing to behaviours that do more harm than good. Hence, fragmentation stretches along many axes: personal, social, scientific, technological and philosophical. Nanquanu was founded out of the desire to help reduce some of this fragmentation.