In Progress: Diary of an Eternal Optimist
{This article is perpetually in progress.}
Early childhood dreams
Communal Architecture
Shower + toilets rooms
The dreams started off as large shower rooms with toilets, without any stall walls.
As I grew older, the shower rooms became mazes, with visible sight of showers and toilets engineered to accommodate varying preferences for privacy. I found myself lost in search of my friendly communal space, in my haste defaulting to more readily accessible private options.
Bedrooms
An enormous bedroom with a squishy floor for any and all to rest on.
As I grew older, the bedrooms became terraced and individually styled. Choosing a bed became a social challenge, though usually jovial.
Nightmares
The Sinking City
A mansion, sinking into the sea, with incomplete ornate decor, a whiff of a curling smell of moldy carpets. The slouchy butler said to me, semi-convincingly, “it’s pretty great to live here.”
The Poisoned Food
I am a woman at a cafe. I am handed a fork with golden tater tot. The white light glistens on the tot with notes of teal and magenta, erring toward purple. From the foundation of my being I knew that it was poisoned. But how could I tell people about this, without alarming people and potentially calling my sanity into question? I pause, and then I eat it. “One.” My sight begins to dim. Another is on my fork; I eat it. “Two.” The danger is less impending. … “Three.”
I wake up, upset and disturbed.
Every day I am grounded in my vision: A space that is designed to accommodate continuous shared existence.
I believe that there is a logical gravitation toward collaborative existence.
Communal space and collaboration
evolved food, resources and architecture, production coordinated by quantified consumption.
I’ve adopted a diet based on plants that can be grown vertically and space-efficiently. nutritionally complete and satisfyingly diverse meals.
each person given open time and space for freeflowing movement
I remind myself that it’s completely feasible. We have the
Leela Maps
I need data for my app.
I remind myself that it isn’t a vanity app. It doesn’t coerce people to get their data, there’s no money for advertisements.
It is a map notes app, with hashtags and privacy settings. Private is encrypted, public is crowdsourced. Its fundamental structure is everything I could ever want in an app. (But it needs data.) It was written for me by the former CTO of Bittorrent.
It has an elegant interface that uses the power of human language
It can effectively display share personals, free stuff, emergency services, news broadcasts, sharing economies, public & private resources, even poetry and travel tips. It is technically feasible for it to share updated GPS locations and IoT devices (blood glucose monitors??).
Its purpose is to connect people to what they need, to share what they can. ersonals
It’s existed for two years, been live for one. I’m still the only user. It really needs more data.
“It” is Leela Maps.
The responsibility of sharing this platform sits on my shoulders.
November 4, 2019
I just got off a call to a food testing lab.
“I have an app for where you could map test sites and filter them by categories and quality, and share versions of the map privately or publicly.”
The researcher responded with enthusiasm.
I didn’t mention that my app currently only runs on iOS. Their food testing device requires an Android phone. But no matter, spreadsheets are crossplatform! Nothing can stop the conceptual reality that we are setting into motion
This app is in dire need of data for it to be relevant.
Maybe food testing data isn’t sexy to most people, but it’s an important segment of society.
Leela Maps is a platform for users to set locations with whatever information and hashtags they want it searched by, shared as publicly or privately as they want.
The kind of data inputted will determine the audience, the direction of further use. It’s not as sexy as personals or store inventories, but this data matters.
The app’s name is Leela Maps.
Leela Maps is a simple app with an enormous vision.
It can be a personals app.
It can be an adventure game app.
The word “leela” in Hinduism is the cosmic play of the universe. It is increasingly used in yoga, improv, dance, and spiritual communities as a title for expansive, genre-bending practice. It was also the name I was given at birth, reflecting an auspicious
Once my site is a little less craptastic, I’ll post ads on Craigslist, and of course, here.
This version of Leela Maps was coded by a former CTO of Bittorrent, the decentralized downloading platform.
Map Your Neighborhood for Fun and Profit
Join the decentralized Leela Maps squad, or start your own
Leela Maps is both Signal and an unmoderated Craigslist
Mapping Soil Conditions
Actions that can
Protester Resource Coordination, local grower movements
Crop Swaps
Makerspaces, Workshops are invaluable resources to be utilized in new local ecologically sustainable supply chains.
Safehouses
Events
Crop Swaps,
Articles
Leela Maps
Leela Maps is an app for crowdsourced public maps and encrypted private maps. Like Mapstr, it uses filters.
Leela Maps has an API. If you are a programmer who is interested in sharing data from IoT devices.
Current version of Leela Maps is like a map version of both Signal and an unmoderated Craigslist.
