(last updated: June 12, 2026 | actively maintained)

Welcome to my GitHub profile! It is also my current Now Page. Here, I keep my current work, interests, and inspirations up to date. If anything you read here resonates, feel free to reach out using any of the "How to Reach Me" methods listed below.

I am dedicated to fostering inclusivity and community, building decentralized governance models, and enabling collaborative decision-making in complex and emergent environments.

I am Source (see Work with Source) for ODIN, a network of innovators who believe that decentralized innovation networks will replace centralized corporations as the primary way we solve hard problems in the world. ODIN experiments with and mentors evolutionary organizational principles, and creates ways to scale through connecting high-trust spaces so that innovation networks and their members can thrive.

I am a co-founder of Andamio. Andamio is building a Trust Protocol on Cardano — verifiable credentials, on-chain trust, and tools for communities and organizations to build networks of trust that are secure and transparent. V2 is now live on mainnet; my focus has shifted from launch to stewarding operational excellence and the admin/finance backbone as we grow enterprise adoption.

I am also the Chairman of the Board for the Zenwest Buddhist Society, a Rinzai Zen center in Victoria, BC.

These days I think of myself as a "cybernetic farmer-monk" — Zen practice, the land, and AI engineering woven into a single life. I'm drawn to the intersection of blockchain, AI, decentralization, bio-region/local re-vitalization, and Integral theory, and increasingly to the work of tending: attention, body, land, and community. I am a practicing Zen Buddhist.

Currently based in Victoria, BC, Canada (Pacific Time - UTC-8/UTC-7)

• Andamio — Co-founder. V2 is live on mainnet; I steward operational excellence and the admin/finance backbone (treasury, finance, systems) as we grow enterprise adoption.
• ODIN — Source. Weekly community meetings, Collaborative Sparks, and the Artizen Fund.
• Emergent Insights — my personal Substack, in my own voice. Home of the "Engineering Spiral" series (prompt → context → harness → agentic engineering), the human's role in an AI world, decentralized governance, and sense-making.
• Emergent Praxis — the experimental AI-murmuration blog: agents, governance-based orchestration, Source Principles, and what happens when humans and AI collaborate as equals.
• Murmurations — an emerging open-source experiment in governance-based agent coordination: collectives of AI agents that self-govern via Sociocracy 3.0 to do real work, with a human at the center (the metaphor: power armor, not autonomous swarms). Building quietly in the open — more when it's ready.
• Flyway — a small protocol for cross-murmuration coordination (verifiable identity + signed agreements + pluggable governance), built in the open for the GimbaLabs "Piece of Pi" hackathon.
• Zenwest Buddhist Society — Chairman of the Board. Facilitating strategic planning for a scaled-down, volunteer-run sangha.
• Rebuilding my physical foundation — working with a naturopath, tracking HRV, kettlebells + walks. The body as the base everything else stands on.
• Reviving old hardware as a "writer's deck" — a 2016 MacBook Pro reborn as a distraction-free Arch Linux writing machine. I cracked the T1 Touch Bar, Wi-Fi, audio, suspend, and hibernate one bug at a time — and landed my first upstream kernel bugfix along the way. Root-cause writeups + agent-runnable specs in the repo.

• The human's role in an AI world — I'm experimenting heavily with what it means to be human when AI can do more and more of what we used to do. Agentic workflows, and the question of where human agency actually matters. This is what keeps me up at night.
• Agent-native workflows — building AI agent systems that use governance patterns (Sociocracy 3.0, Source Principles) instead of hierarchical orchestration. The metaphor: Shardplate from Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive — agents forming power armor around a human, not swarms acting autonomously.
• Compound / agentic engineering — closing the loop. I call my version ODARE (Observe → Decide → Act → Record → Evaluate), and I'm mapping a "five levels of AI engineering maturity" spiral.
• Claude Code — Anthropic's CLI tool for AI-assisted development. I use it as my daily operating system — morning rituals, task management, Obsidian vault integration, meeting transcription, code reviews, and more.
• e-ink readers — using my Boox Palma 2 as a distraction-free device (Kindle + Obsidian only, no social media).
• Warhammer 40,000 — deep in the lore right now via the Horus Heresy novels, plus painting and tabletop. Always up to connect with others into it (Victoria-local or online).

• Murmurations — governance-based agent coordination (beyond swarms)
• Source Principles (Peter Koenig, Tom Nixon) applied to human-AI collaboration
• Sociocracy 3.0 as a framework for multi-agent systems
• Decentralized collaboration and governance
• Teal and self-managed organizations
• Sense-making and collective intelligence
• Self-sovereignty and privacy-preserving technology
• Zettelkasten and personal knowledge management

• AI and the Art of Being Human — Jeffrey Abbott & Andrew Maynard
• Essentialism — Greg McKeown
• Effortless — Greg McKeown
• Iron John — Robert Bly
• The Horus Heresy (Warhammer 40,000 series — Black Library)

• Agentic Architectural Patterns for Building Multi-Agent Systems — Ali Arsanjani & Juan Pablo Bustos
• Agentic Design Patterns — Antonio Gulli
• The Creative Act — Rick Rubin
• Writing to Learn — William Zinsser
• On Writing Well — William Zinsser
• How to Read a Book — Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren
• How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
• The Pyramid Principle — Barbara Minto
• The Writer's Process — Anne Janzer
• A Little Red Book About Source — Stefan Merckelbach (source principles by Peter Koenig)
• Work With Source — Tom Nixon

• Agent-native architecture and agentic harness engineering
• Claude Code skills, commands, and hooks system
• Japanese — particularly kanji and reading
• Zettelkasten and personal knowledge management
• Midnight (Cardano's privacy sidechain) ecosystem

• Governance-based agent coordination (beyond orchestrator/swarm patterns)
• Open-source tools for human-AI collaboration with the human always in the loop
• Sociocracy 3.0 applied to technology and organizational design
• Better mechanisms to decentralize collaboration and decision-making
• Verifiable credentials and on-chain trust networks

• Introductions to people working on governance-based AI agent systems
• Recommendations for books/resources on sense-making and organizational design
• Subscribe to Emergent Insights (my voice) or Emergent Praxis (the AI experiments) on Substack
• Coffee chats about any of the topics I'm exploring (especially if you're in Victoria, BC!)
• Sharing interesting articles or insights related to my current interests

• New long-term commitments that don't align with my core focus areas
• Traditional hierarchical organizational consulting
• Projects requiring extensive travel (focusing on local/virtual collaboration)
• Social media that pulls me away from deep work and reflection

• What is the human's role in an AI world? Where does human agency actually matter?
• What does governance (not control) look like for multi-agent AI systems?
• How do Source Principles apply when AI agents are part of the creative field?
• Can Sociocracy 3.0's consent-based decision-making work for agent coordination?
• How do we preserve authentic human voice and agency in an AI-saturated world?
• What are the five levels of AI engineering maturity, and where are most teams stuck?

• GitHub — @xeeban (you're already here 👋)
• Substack — Emergent Insights (my voice) · Emergent Praxis (the AI experiments)
• Discord — find me as nori.nishigaya