Brandon Nørgaard
I’m a writer, researcher, software developer, and community organizer. I co-founded The Civic Enlightenment Project (CEP) with a group of collaborators, and I have contributed to several organizations in the areas of community development, sensemaking, institutional reform, civic engagement, and mindfulness practice. I am based in Northern California and I have a background in software engineering. My path into sociology and philosophy came through years of sustained interest in traditions including integral theory, metamodernism, and phenomenology, and a set of ideas I had been developing that I thought could contribute to broader efforts at addressing the metacrisis.
Research and Development Work
» I am a member of the operations team at Eudaimonia Institute, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to the art of radical planetary flourishing. Eudaimonia provides metasystemic vision connecting several of the projects I’m involved with, and is the fiscal sponsor of CEP.
» I am a graduate student at the California Institute for Human Science studying wisdom design and I am conducting research through the Center for Applied Integrative Metatheory, which is one of the university’s research centers. The Civic Enlightenment Project is a part of my forthcoming master’s thesis and research.
» I am developing Civic Intelligence Infrastructure, a project under the fiscal sponsorship of Mediators Foundation. This is intended to provide technical support for Better Together America and its network of civic hubs.
» I am co-developing OpenHaven, a protocol navigator and taxonomy project mapping the ecosystem of decentralized, peer-to-peer, and prosocial technologies. One aspect of this is a proposed Sovereign Stack Model for web3.
» I co-authored a paper with Nicholas Hedlund, PhD and Claudia Meglin entitled Mapping an Ecology of Integrative Approaches to Addressing the Metacrisis, published by the Institute of Applied Metatheory. I also presented preliminary pre-publication research in a session of the web series The Stoa.
» I have assisted with organizational planning for some Liminal Web adjacent communities, including the ICON Future Human Conference and the Emerge Gathering. I have also researched the larger Liminal Web space and created a report on network mapping and automation.
» I am a member of Gregg Henriques’ Unified Theory of Knowledge Society. I presented at multiple UTOK Consilience Conferences: In ’23 on the topic of Enlightenment 2.0: Bridging the Gap Through the Convergence of Western and Eastern Enlightenment Traditions. In ’24 on Bildung and Enlightenment 2.0 at the Time of the Fifth Joint Point. In ’25, I took part in a panel discussion on UTOK Psycheology and presented on JII Mindfulness, which led to the co-authorship of a blog post on this topic with Marcia Gralha and Gregg Henriques.
» I have been involved with the Arch-Disciplinary Research Center. I presented at a salon hosted by this organization on Archdisciplinarity and the Meta-Crisis.
» I have appeared in episodes of podcast series including The Integral Stage (twice), Practical IntegralUTOKing with Gregg, This Journey, MetaView, Manifest Nirvana, and Meta-Ideological Politics.
» I contributed to the educational course Overflowing Purpose, which was created by Lee Mason and hosted by Integral Life.
» I also co-hosted a series of online salons hosted by Integral Life called Integral Sensemaking for Global and National Events.
Software Development Portfolio
» OpenHaven – a protocol navigator website I co-created
» Sovereign Stack Model – an interactive entity placement diagram for the OpenHaven taxonomy
» Generalized Integrative Methodology – an informational website I created
» Dell OpenManage – a network management product I worked on for several years while with Dorado Software