A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute
Mission
CETI puts the power of emergent technology innovation directly into the hands of communities that need it most, through collaborative learning, creativity, and invention, leading to a more joyful, prosperous, sustainable, and innovative commons.
CETI is a radically inclusive gathering space for lifelong learning, research, creation, and innovation in emergent technologies. Through our workshops and institutes, creative technology festivals, hackathons for collaborative creation and peer-learning, a cutting-edge community technology lab staffed by experts, and experiential learning in our projects with social impact, we democratize access to and opportunity for learning, creation, and invention, moving power and creative agency to community.
We rapidly build expertise across demographics, sectors, disciplines, and cultures to wield the powerful tools of art, emerging technology, and storytelling to imaginatively address urgent social, environmental challenges.
Vision
The power of emergent technology should be owned and deployed by the communities that need it most. CETI enables this prosperity of the commons through collaborative learning, creativity and invention.
Principles and Values
ACCESS TO THE FUTURE
CETI has a powerful vision for how communities learn, research, innovate and create. Its core methodology is to convene interdisciplinary gatherings of those that seek to address our greatest challenges through creativity and technology.
LEARNING: BRING OUR BEST
CETI imagines learning as transformative, evolving and responsive, experiential, interdisciplinary, and lifelong. We create an environment that inspires everybody to contribute to the peak of their abilities—with fluency and confidence.
CREATIVE EXPERIMENTS
We embed a culture of creative experimentation and play in our endeavors fostering risk-taking and imagination. This builds trust and confidence leading to joyful learning and transformative change.
HUMAN PERSPECTIVE
We look at challenges—and solutions—through the lens of humanity. We design and create with all our stakeholders, accounting for the implications and impact of our work in the world. We believe that true innovation must break down inequity in both process and result
EMERGENCE: IMPACT IN THE WORLD
We catalyze community-driven, messy convenings—participatory projects that include experts and non-experts. Each brings a diversity of skills, experience, expertise, and cultural context. Ultimately, the best responses emerge from unexpected collisions among people and their ideas. Our products will be open-source, community-owned, and made as widely available whenever possible.
TRUST
Truth and independence are paramount to our role as trusted host. We cultivate connections and relationships across and within our communities moving at the speed of trust, building deep, resilient networks across sectors, disciplines, regions, and communities.
DEMOCRATIZING SYSTEMS
We are radically inclusive, emphasizing access and opportunity, by working in participatory non-hierarchical structures and creating tools to foster engagement by a diversity of communities. We prioritize actions that center power with all stakeholder and partners, especially including previously excluded populations to ensure that we all have voice and agency in creating our future.
What We Offer
We design exciting collaborative project-based convenings fostering learning, creation, and critical dialogue integrating art, science, engineering, storytelling, culture, mathematics, and technology to address urgent, emergent, and complex social, environmental, and technological challenges of the future.
Who We Are
CETI prioritizes including and collaborating with communities previously marginalized, under-represented, and under-served in tech. Through our lived experiences and diversity in demographics, we bring a diversity of critical and cultural lenses to the intentional design of our programs, as well as a laser-focus on inclusion and support of communities significantly under-represented in technology conversations.
CETI is a collective—of artists, technologists, storytellers, educators, researchers, innovators, and leaders—composed of experts and lifelong learners, excited to share our ideas and skills. A subset of us engage with each project, alternatively taking on roles as learners, facilitators, creators, producers, and advisors, wielding the powerful tools of art, emerging technology, and storytelling to imagine and create inclusive, just futures.
Partners, Donors, Supporters, and Grantors
CETI is grateful to have generous donors that support learning and innovation in our community.