Mappa.
A meaning-map for the people around a shared endeavour.
In NZ we joke about one degree of separation. You walk down Oxford Street in London and pass someone you know from home. You get talking on a ski lift in Canada and they turn out to be someone’s cousin you grew up near. After a while it stops being a joke and starts being a worldview: we are all connected, and the connections are closer and stranger than they have any right to be.
I have always loved that. Not as a networking fact, as a human one. Connection isn’t linear and it isn’t tidy. It runs on memory and emotion, on who knows whom and who vouched for whom. It is one of the most human things there is.
Most of the tools we use to keep track of people don’t believe any of that. A CRM asks where someone sits in a pipeline. An org chart asks who reports to whom. They map coordinates. They turn a living web of people into a list of positions, and in doing so they quietly throw away the only part that mattered.
Mappa is named after the mappa mundi, the medieval maps of the world. Those maps were never built to get you from one place to another. They showed how a whole world related, arranged around a centre that mattered. A map of meaning, not coordinates.
That is what Mappa is for an organisation. A map of the people around a shared endeavour, drawn the way connection actually works: relational, layered, human. It holds what you and the people you trust know to be true, and it helps you see the web you are already standing in. The introduction you could make. The person you should bring in. The opportunity one connection away that no single person could have held in their head.
The principle, and the point
It works on one rule. You own what is true. You own what you do about it. The intelligence only works in the middle. It helps you see. It never decides who matters, and it never makes the call. Technology in service of an innately human thing, not a replacement for it.
I built it because I wanted to run the things I am part of this way. Underneath it is a simpler conviction. We are all more connected than we think, the connections are worth honouring, and they deserve a better map.
Rachel