The foundation
About
Orbital is led by Anselm Hook, whose career has run through games, virtual and augmented reality, mapping and civic technology. The project grew out of a long interest in simulation as a way for people to think together about places they share.
Contributors and supporters
Acknowledged in full in the primer:
- Anastasiya Soheil al-Fard built alongside the project: engineering, design and deployment, with a care for trustworthy public-facing systems that the work inherits directly.
- Futurewei, under its grants program, supported two years of the underlying engine and application work.
- Howard Silverman of EcoTrust and Tish Shute helped shape the work and its place in civic and bioregional networks.
- The Long Now Foundation collaborated on the New California Water Atlas, where the conviction that public data wants public form was first tested in practice.
The project also stands on open infrastructure: the data commons of NASA, NOAA, ESA and the IPCC, and OpenStreetMap and its mappers.
Values
Nature-centered ethics. Value belongs to all living entities, not just people. The measure is to maximize diversity, to see stakeholders more clearly, to be inclusive, and to give them a voice, including the non-human stakeholders with whom we share a heritage.
Dreaming at scale. Millions of minds co-create our shared experience. We need to see the deep implications of our thinking, to appreciate the challenges others face, and to see the existential threats we share. Predicting the outcomes of land-use policy or local climate impacts requires a hybrid of human and machine reasoning, and it must be accessible to all.
Disintermediation. Open source, open data, and ultimately the distribution of agency, legitimacy and power.
Code and licensing
Source is on GitHub under the orbitalfoundation organization, and the packages are on npm under the @orbitalfoundation scope. Code is released under the MIT license. Text on this site is © Anselm Hook.