Emily McGill

I am a polymath with a passion to catalyze communities to unite around systems change. I build, guide, & ignite networks to coalesce around systemic problems and collaboratively prototype system-level solutions.

My conventional schooling was in Bioresource Engineering, centered around agriculture and waste management. Following on that, my day-job career focus has been around product design and policy planning for waste prevention.

My natural affinity / life path is as an irrepressible leader, facilitator, and coach. Following on THAT, my passion-work focus is to cultivate the next generation of organizations designed to move us towards a more regenerative culture.

On the tech side, I’m a project manager, No Stack rather than Full Stack :P. I don’t code beyond basic HTML and CSS for web design, though I can help coders with their documentation because I type at the speed of light and rock at dumbing down complexity to layperson’s terms.

As for cryptocurrencies, I’m more interested in mutual credit designs than conventional blockchain, but I do dabble in ETH and DOGE. I’m part of the holochain (Holo) community for this region, and previously helped host a holochain hackathon in Vancouver back in 2018. Holochain is the first outgrowth of a larger project which is a promising attempt to distribute and decentralize the internet.

Specific projects I’ve co-founded:

Master Recycler Vancouver (MRV). Founded in 2015, this is an annual, nine-week adult educational course on waste prevention, behaviour change, and community activation. We went virtual due to COVID and I became a videoconferencing workshop / class / engagement master.

Living Systems Network (LSN). Applying the principles of distributed governance to seed radical systems change, by designing, prototyping and open-sourcing organizational tools for a regenerative culture. Examples: how to make decisions in small teams, aligning on values, dealing with emergence and uncertainty.

WholeWorld. The consulting corporation I’ve created that acts as the requisite intermediary between the monolithic military-industrial complex, with its associated economic traps, and my own holistic service approach.

Other projects I’ve joined:

The Decentralized Dance Party (DDP). (obvy). I came on in August 2019 motivated by my own need to host a dance party, and set up the DDP with some internal organizational scaffolding they’d been somehow surviving without for 11 years, enhancing the scalability and replicability at least 1000 fold. I’ve co-hosted three hybrid virtual/realworld dance parties and dance-facilitated in tens more with the DDP.

Co-Reality Collective (CRC). A global network of artists and burners that took the party online when the pandemic hit. I joined their midst as a DDP envoy and quickly noted the open wound in their strategic organizational design, stepped up for a few months to assist and co-guide their initial governance formulation. I stay involved to support their regular virtual festivals.

Textile Lab for Circularity (TLC). A multi-year social innovation lab to get textiles out of the landfill. I’m the Collaboration Strategist, navigating the complex agreements involved in a project that has an innovative organizational structure, with multiple tiers of engagement, including participants who are effectively competitors that we inspire and enable to collaborate over shared values.

And more...