Jessy Kate Schingler

I’m a technologist, hacker, designer of experimental institutions, and community builder, with a particular love of all things urban, peer learning, architecture, and distributed systems.

I am interested in the design of systems that manifest our environment and social structures as an iterative learning platform for experimentation and innovation. I envision citizens as creators and participatory scientists. Our built environment and social institutions can be optimized to facilitate human creativity and collaboration. A major enabler for this can be technology, both as a means to study and learn from large scale statistical patterns in these environments (data mining), as well as designing and embedding technology to augment, redefine, or even blur environments such as home, work, public space, play, or transportation. The other approach of interest is in prototyping experimental physical spaces through real estate and property development.

My company combines technology and property development for experimental placemaking.

Some specific projects I am currently working on:

The Embassy Network Alpha house, a combined community house cum bed and breakfast that is exploring notions of home through radical inclusion of travelers, “modern nomads,” and a broader programme of events and projects, plus the use of some light weight technology to increase the probability of serendipitous interactions.  Modernomad is our homegrown guest management and reservation software for this purpose.  I am also a San Francisco Mayor’s Innovation Fellow looking at the topic of high density urban housing.
La Choza del Mundo, a place to work on projects in the mountainous jungle of Costa Rica. We’re always looking for fellows who want to spend time at the property and create something special.
I have also been a long time community member and volunteer with the Peer to Peer University, a community experimenting with peer learning and open education. I help out on the software/tech team, and develop content around learning how to program and open/citizen research.
I’m on Twitter, Github, Facebook, and various other places around the webs.