Hi Team,
Long time no talk.
I know all of us are exhausted in some way or another right now, so I wanted to update and encourage you in the form of a short letter.
This letter also serves as an introduction to a new platform that will make all of our lives so so so much easier - no matter how closely you're engaged with Lander, there's something for you here. There is nothing for you to remember now, and no lack of clarity on project status or next steps ever again.
Welcome to The Lander Open Organization hosted on Notion, or just Lander.Earth for short. Yes we'll have lander.moon and lander.mars when people live on those celestial bodies in the next few years. No, you can't register those domains yet because they don't exist, but I appreciate you asking.
Notion is an amazing platform, you can learn more about them by searching notion on youtube or visiting their website. It's basically Evernote but it makes sense. It's Wordpress but you don't have to learn how to use it. It's Medium but no memberships. It's Airtable or Coda with no learning curve. It's Google Docs and Google Sheets but well organized, beautiful, and easy to use, It's incredible. Download the Notion mobile app right now or click the icon in the top corner of this page to make an account when you're ready.
If you feel like I dropped off the map for a couple of weeks, you'd be right. I got diagnosed with COVID-19 last Wednesday. I finally got tested Monday the 6th after two full weeks of just not feeling right. It's been a wild experience and I know you probably have a lot of questions - I'll be doing an AMA live on Facebook in a few weeks to answer all those. All that you need-to-know for now is that I'm well, it didn't get life-threatening for me, and I have anti-bodies. I am not contagious anymore and I can take care of my parents without worrying about infecting them now! yay.
If you'd save any questions about my sickness for the AMA that would be great, I'm not super keen on telling everyone about how I spent two weeks sick over and over. All you need to know is wear gloves and a mask when you go grocery shopping, or better yet order groceries - don't go anywhere. If you want to give yourself a full panic attack you can always follow me on twitter for all of my opinions on COVID. Anyway, Whole Foods delivers now.
To follow all that up (as if getting the latest plague wasn't enough) one of my closest friends and collaborators (I had the honor of helping design, write, and give rounds of feedback on many of the pieces of Toni’s work you see shared in that article) died last weekend unrelated to COVID, so it's been... well it's just been rough. If you've seen my instagram stories, you get it. If you don't already follow me please do and say hi! Turn on notifications too if you want by tapping the follow button a second time. :)
I’m okay but I need your help.
For those of you really out of the loop, Lander is 5 now. And like most 5 year olds, Lander has two arms: Lander Foundation & Lander Media #dadjokes
If you want to see the full hierarchy of how projects relate to each other and you're a visual person like me, it's all in the sidebar after you log in.
One arm is products, the other is communities. One is nonprofit, the other is for-profit. There's some overlap between them (lander media pays for the marketing for TEDx for example...) but that's the general idea.
In terms of the big picture, I've had an entire month since I began self-quarantine on March 3rdish to think through how we run the Foundation without being able to host events for the next two years, and also to re-design how these courses will run in light of the new world we live in.