GPS Panorama
GPS Panorama
Matthew and Liam met in summer 2019 at the Global Pathfinders Summit in Virginia. This program was run by the Presidential Precinct to honor the 400th year anniversary of the Virginia General Assembly.
200 people from 50 countries and 25 virginians were brought together to learn and share about democracy, history and the global challenges faced by young people in our world today.
During a collaborative dotmocracy activity to develop the Virginia Declarations, Matthew and Liam started to engage based on their shared interests and passions around disability and inclusion.
Equitable democractic practices involves including everyone across the spectrum of perspective and ability, weaving together our diversity into a universal approach that yield better results for everyone.
Increasing the level of democracy in our society is an inclusive design challenge, as our current political systems are exclusionary and don't necessarily have the resources to bring about the level of inclusion that we need to make our world more fair and equitable.
Moving from where we are to where we want to be on these issues requires effort from all stakeholders, unifying our voices and needs to ensure our social systems represent and respond to our evolving needs.
400 years ago modern representative democracy was founded in Virginia, however to truly modernize our social fabric we need to explore new ways of collecting and meeting the needs of our societies across all our beautiful diversity.
Working together to solve our problems and designing as a collective process is itself the realization of democratic practice.
How do we define inclusion and who is not currently being included? These questions represent ongoing and evolving conversations which reflect our understanding of power structures that underpin our lives. To truly advance inclusion and build more equitable societies we need to establish and advance more diverse movements that represent and reflect all differences as a strength.
Social movements need to be made more available to those populations on the margins, including disability. Social movements are generally not accessible and need to conduct self reflection in order to determine why that is the case and how they can address this.