Assetmap Blog Company blog on how social capital is transforming business, culture and social change

Mapmakers: A New Award Honoring The World’s Greatest Opportunity Creators

Today we announce the launch of the Mapmakers Award from Assetmap, a new program honoring the world’s greatest opportunity creators.

After the long winter of the middle ages, the Renaissance was like an incredible blooming spring. The majesty of new art and the brilliance of new science helped an entire continent rediscover the wonder of creation. And as people began to look outward once again, they found that the world was much larger and more full of possibility than they had ever imagined.

The generation that followed pushed outward initiating journeys that would transform and inform everything that came next. The people who made sense of it all were the mapmakers. These mapmakers didn’t just created navigational charts. By connecting the dots and drawing the lines, they expanded the boundary of the known universe, literally changing people’s sense of the possible. The provided the foundation upon which entire societies were built.

Today, we’re in our own Renaissance, but it is a renaissance of relationships. Technology has made the world smaller and closer than ever before, and has created a new context in which relationships can flourish across greater barriers than ever before. In the process, we’ve begun to rediscover the importance of social capital – the currency of relationships that binds people and groups together, and through which they share resources and create opportunities for one another.

The cornerstones of this renaissance are the connectors – the people who facilitate introductions across boundaries of group and country, across industry and experience. The connectors in society are the people who understand the power of social capital, and help reveal the network of resources that each of us has at our disposal.

These are our modern mapmakers. And whether its Erik Hersman, the founder of a nonprofit that has used talent and experience from a dozen countries to change how we use technology to respond to crisis, Jennifer Pahlka, who is helping talent from the consumer internet collaborate with civic leaders to solve the problems of modern government, or Jeff Slobotski, who is creating avenues for tech talent from the midwest to interact and collaborate with leaders on both coasts, the common thread is that these mapmakers know that when great people connect, the whole is significantly more than the sum of the parts, and it’s not just the individuals involved but the world as a whole that benefits.

The Mapmakers Award is Assetmap’s way of honoring these incredible opportunity creators, and our way to share their insights about networking, social capital, and relationship building. Each week, we’ll feature a handful of new mapmakers, and at least once a year, we’ll collect their collective insights in a more significant way.

The point of this is not to suggest that these mapmakers are superhuman. Indeed, the opposite is true. The reality is that what almost all of them share is simply a bias towards helping and a joy in seeing what happens when great people connect. We at Assetmap believe with every fiber of our being that everyone has the capacity to be a mapmaker, and our mission is to make that easier than ever before.

If you know someone who should be a mapmaker, please nominate them. And please check out the social capital insights from our very first Mapmaker, Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka

Photo: A famous map from 1585 that imagined Jerusalem at the center of the universe.