Good tools always have unintended uses stumbled upon by its individual and collective users. Hopefully, that will be the case of élan map, too. I can hardly wait for its alpha version to manifest so that we can start playing with it and discover its potential beyond what it was originally conceived.

A possibility that I am particularly interested in and want to explore further as the components of our mapping tool gain higher resolution is this:

What if we convened an expert panel of thinkers and doers in selected disciplines, and let them loose in a treasure hunting exercise using our interactive map of social and thought movements on the edge?

The question that we would ask could include something like this: Looking back from the middle of the 21st century, which of the movements mapped by élan would be considered as having had a significant impact on the transition to our new planetary reality?

Then we could compare the data coming from a modified Delphi survey  of our panel with the data from the  hypertrails connecting the vistas in the landscape of transformational memes and movements.

Hypertrails are those affinity passages between the vistas, the salient points (or strange attractors) in the landscape, which will emerge from our very walking those trails. Just as students cut new paths on campus lawn by going for shorter connection between buildings they visit more frequently…

What if we had a chance to distort the timeline by using information from the Delphi’s “visit from the future”? 🙂