This might be the longest single post in EdgeRyders’ history, maybe. It’s certainly long overdue - going forward I will aim to do this monthly.
Here you can read the fullest overview I can give of the unMonastery project’s current progress. This could be broken into a number of posts but that would take a lot of time. Feel free to skip to parts that are most relevant to you if you have limited time.
What I suggest: if you’d like to help build momentum for any single area laid out here, that you take what I’ve written and break it out into a separate post, expanding on the points I’ve already made.
Alternatively, I’ve set out for each area ‘The Should’, ‘The Could’ and ‘The Would’.
‘Shoulds’ are things that need to happen, ‘Coulds’ are things that’d be great if they did happen, ‘Woulds’ are things for an ideal world. Each of these represent tasks, it’d be helpful -if you’re inclined this way- to either repost it as a task on the platform or just take it and run with it and report back when you’re done.
unMonastery is now quite a large project organisationally with lots of people inputting, for all those reading who think I’ve missed something or have additional news, please bullet point/write up in the comments thread and I’ll append it to the main post.
Areas Covered are:
unMonastery Matera
unMonastery Applications
unMonastery Organisation
unMonastery Team
unMonastery Track at LOTE3
unMonastery Communications
unMonastery Building Blocks and Design
unMonastery Friends and Family
So, lets begin…
unMonastery Matera:
Things are going well, at least it definitely feels that way, with Matera as the host of lote3 the building of unMonastery and increased capacity of EdgeRyders bodes well. It’s important to note though everyone working at the engine of LOTE is overstretched - if you can help in anyway please do (the easiest way to dive in is by joining a Friday community call or following the summaries, here’s the latest: /t/making-lote3/360/lote3-countdown-summary-videos-of-community-call-oct-4th)
There is only one concern in this moment and that’s the building set to host unMonastery; we had hoped it would act as the main venue for LOTE but progress has been slow, despite Rita’s hard work in co-ordinating with the local municipality the building won’t be ready in time for the conference.
It will however be ready in advance of the opening and this poses a big but exciting question;
What could we use the unMonastery for in the lead up to it’s opening in February?
I’m tentatively considering spending Christmas there, if others were interested in joining me?
The Should:
-Could Rita, or anyone on the ground in Matera give an overview of what we should be aware of.
The Could:
-Raise funding applications to stage events at the unMonastery building in advance of the big opening in February next year.
-Stage an advanced mapping event of the building and the city at large.
The Would:
-It’d be great if each month in the lead up unMonasterians or EdgeRyders could travel to Matera and complete tasks or begin engagement with the local community.
unMonastery Matera Applications:
This is a bit of a worry, I feel I was little overzealous in my estimations for how many applications we might receive. As it currently stands we’ve had 12 applications, it can’t be understated, we need more applications - if you know people who are planning to apply as I do, please prod them, the closing date for round 2 is the 15th of October.
Why are we struggling to attract a large intake of applications? If you’ve taken the time to read through the application you’ll see that the bar to entry is set pretty high, the questions are quite complex, the criteria stipulates you must meet specific challenges and most acutely unMonastery is a new concept.
With this said its important to note that the applications we’ve received so far are strong and that’s good because to make this prototype a success in four months we’re going to need committed unMonasterians with strong skillsets.
We’re doing a couple of things to boast the process, we aim to target as many university courses that make sense - on the UK side David Ridge is taking the lead. This is being framed as a call for thesis residencies. If you’d like to reach out to appropriate course leaders you can take this short text and start emailing:
/t/unmonastery/315/call-for-unmonastery-residencies-as-thesis
In addition if your organisation, meetup or community has a mailing list, please feel free to put the call out on it!
Also there’s a peer review process of applications on the EdgeRyders platform: /t/unmonastery/315-project-applications-peer-review
The Should:
-Visit the peer review process and give feedback to those applying, this hasn’t really happened so far unfortunately.
-Share contact details for any appropriate institutions or specific courses
-Share the application form on social networks weekly
The Could:
-Do everything you can to get additional press for the unMonastery
-Print Moo cards and give them to everyone you meet, designs available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ce700axt4lszwq6/mEC92YWZi2
The Would:
-Fly post appropriate locations and events?
unMonastery Organisation:
We’ve reduced the number of platforms we’re working across after google docs, pbworks and excess emails became too distributed. In the current moment we’re trying to keep communication as centralised as possible on the EdgeRyders platform, for transparency and serendipities sake; mainly.
Here are the ways we’re currently pulling things together:
The page you’re looking at now, which has become the most used space for developing and sharing unMonastery.
Monday Morning Community Calls:
We did this for several months on Sundays, now we do them every Monday morning, here’s a list of summaries from the most recent ones:
/t/unmonastery/315/summary-of-unmonastery-community-call-6
/t/unmonastery/315/summary-of-unmonastery-community-call-5
/t/unmonastery/315/summary-of-unmonastery-community-call-4
The Website:
Needs a redesign but is relatively up to date.
Twitter:
Twitter is a key part of circulating unMonastery and dishing out tasks/reminders.
Meetups:
David Ridge has taken the lead and created the first unMonastery Meetup in London, which will be linked to on the top of the main page soon and linked to here shortly.
The Should:
-It would be much appreciated if someone could help with updating the website, it’s built on a very straight forward CMS called Concrete5, anyone interested let me know!
The Could:
-Start a meetup for unMonastery/EdgeRyders in your city.
-Take turns writing the summary for each community call.
The Would:
-Now that EdgeRyders has become the key platform in which we organise and build the unMonastery, it would be really great to have additional drupal support to build out features and plugins for existing services. Things that are big to build but we fundamentally need: a better task management system, a more informal discussion space, a collaborative writing deck and so much more ^__~
unMonastery Team:
For the first half of this year the project was made up of a rag-tag team who pitched in when they could, people contributed an enormous amount of work but with myself as facilitator it was clear we were following an unsustainable model and were suffering from disorganisation.
You can read more about that moment of realisation here:
/t/unmonastery/315/unmonastic-principles-of-administration-a-call-for-design-solutions
With this in mind, I structured a series of roles within the project based on the work myself and others were doing to keep everything moving - this created a big shift for the structure of the project and many individuals stepped into specific roles. To understand the current organisational structure of unMonastery I maintain an evolving chart, attached to this post but also available as PDF: http://www.unmonastery.eu/pdf/org-chart-v3.pdf
Going forward all teams can do with additional support, if you’d like to take up a specific position, join a team or create your own role for something you believe needs building, please comment below!
Also read this post for details on existing roles:
/t/unmonastery/315/unmonastery-roles-a-call-for-participation
The Should:
-We really need a future planner and fundraiser, someone who’s good at writing funding applications and has the time to identify opportunities and manage them.
The Could:
-Join a team, even small amounts of time given weekly to the project are greatly appreciated and help unMonastery progress.The
Would:
-Create a coded version of the popplet for the website with direct contact details to team members.
unMonastery Track at \#LOTE3:
The unMonastery is the focus of the second track at LOTE this year and as such many amazing people have been putting themselves forward to run and facilitate sessions. We still need more though, with an eye to the future, I’ve taken the time to flesh out a couple of sessions that I think would be exceptionally useful for the project.
Ilaria took the time this weekend to pull together the sessions into a sensical order and I’ve since added to it:
Bearers of Tradition (Bembo Davies) - Acts as the overall hosting committee:
- The online/offline Co-design of the unMon --> this could be a collective session where the different facilitators of the online process speak about their experience? curated by Rita Orlando, Francesco Cingolani and Mimers (official reference for mt2019 and unMon)
- Parametric Design for unMonastery (Immaginoteca)
- Creating an open, daily (research & prototyping) co-design and co-being space (Mishek)
- presence of Ezio Manzini (Alberto Cottica)
- space and co-design (Andrea Paoletti)
- Tools for the unMonastery:
- unMonastery and OpenStreetMap (proposed by Invisigot, not coming to the LOTE3)
- unIforms: habit and belonging (Zoescope) --> needs material!
- the Economy App (Matthias Ansorg)
- Social Dimension of the unMon:
- Convening unMonastery Group Identity (Bergamo-Hub)
- Bearers of Tradition (Bembo Davies)
- about unMonastic Roles and Principles of Administration (Ben)
- The First unMonasterians: (It’d be great to have those who have put in applications lead sessions and build capacity during the conference for their project - I will follow up with people this week to see who’s interested/available)
- ???
- ???
- Extra Sessions I’ve compiled and uploaded today (require facilitators)
/t/unmonastery/315/speculative-session-proposals-for-unmonastery-track-2
- Future Thought: The unMonastery's 200 year trajectory.
- Jurisdiction and the unRule
- Infrastructural implications of the unMonastery
- Replicating unMonastery: Pattern languages and unMonastery in-a-box
- What can unMonastery learn from the ancient past? [Not yet written]
- What can unMonastery learn from the recent past? Social Centers, Hackerspaces, Squats and the communes. [Not yet written]
Additional Ideas for the conference:
Skillset Badges: https://edgeryders.eu/comment/6512#comment-6512
Challenges Board: To keep everyone mindful of the fact that unMonastery is designed to target specific challenges of a local area, I propose we put up a board with a list of the challenges and people can stick post its for ideas and solutions used elsewhere to each challenge throughout the weekend.
http://unmonastery.eu/index.php/goals/challenges-matera/
1 - 1 Workshops: “The mini-workshop (say 4 minutes) would be a personal transmission of perspective or skills that everyone could exchange one to one. We’ll have to work up a description of the framework somewhat. My mini-w/s might be: Polish your unMo Job Description. Dorothea and I did it for me, and got as far as The Precious Fountain of New-fangled Ancient Tradtions. If we can transmit the wisdom in this proposal, I think we will have a powerful tool to enriching our exchange from the word go. A linguistic down-sizing component could go here. - See more at: /t/lote3/312-and-unmonastery-hosts-commitee/bearers-of-the-tradition#sthash.LFVnGk3z.dpuf “
The Should:
-Propose a session if you think something is missing, or you have something to share.
The Could:
-Take the lead on facilitating one of the sessions proposed that is currently facilitatorless
unMonastery Communications:
Our biggest communications achievement to date has to be the twitterstorm press conference created a couple of weeks ago - with it we put out our first press release, grew the audience of unMonastery/EdgeRyders and trended on twitter in Italy and Belgium.
Read about it here:
/t/unmonastery/315/in-the-eye-of-the-twitterstorm-some-brief-notes-from-the-unmon-press-conference
The communications team is currently made up of Ilaria, Fabio and Paolo.
We also created a press page on the website: http://unmonastery.eu/index.php/press/
Alberto also recently saved the day and pulled together a great article about unMonastery for the Guardian, it has yet to go to print: /t/unmonastery/315/collaboratively-written-article-for-the-guardian-what-uk-local-government-can-learn-from
The Should:
-We need a better press pack, I put it together at last minute - if you think you can make it better please do, it’s currently stored on dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nvvg5tojxn0tzkm/rQeGMhewHc
-We need a website redesign, the current one is okay but it’d be better to simplify it, I’m currently working on this but you can input into the process by giving feedback and ideas on this post: /t/unmonastery/315/reinvent-the-unmonastery-website
-We need a video, well produced, that explains unMonastery fully in 5 minutes, talking heads, key protagonists and shots of Matera.
The Could:
-Ola who does the graphic design work for unMonastery has offered to produce things that need to be created; for presentations, the website and general communications - if you have a clear brief (preferably with a drawing or mockup) email him ola@unmonastery.eu and CC me!
-More people feeding into the social media accounts, if you’d like to do this and are already involved in unMonastery or EdgeRyders email me for access.
-There is a need for a well structured go to presentation for speaking on the unMonastery, its been on the to-do list for months, I will have this done by mid-november at the latest but any help is appreciated in advance.
The Would:
-???
unMonastery Conceptual Building Blocks and Design:
The unRule and new forms of Monastic Life:
Alberto has been doing brilliant work drawing on the threads of early monastic life, to frame how the unMonastery might learn from the benedictine monks:
unMonastery in-a-box:
We got to the second round of a nominet bid for 90k to build this, due to numerous factors we dropped the ball on this a bit but myself and Gaia are in the process of reorienting the approach, here’s some extracts from the first application we made:
“unMonastery-in-a-box supports rapid startup, running and evaluation of locality-based social innovation based on an existing prototype: the Italian unMonastery project in Matera. It allows for an iterative open source development approach to offline projects.
What need is your project looking to address (100):
Too much social innovation happens in small, disconnected projects and is disseminated in dry case studies that overstate success and downplay failures. Similar problems are being faced, and similar solutions often reappear.
“unMonastery”, a current model of place-based social innovation, addresses the interlinked needs of empty space, unemployment and austerity. This project allows unMonasteries to be started up and replicated easily, allowing each project to be consistently evaluated with innovations and improvements fed back. As with GitHub, the project models will branch and iterate so that different places can learn from the projects that are most similar to them.
How will your project address this need? (200)
The unMonastery model is well suited to a time of high youth unemployment, a sense that traditional approaches are failing, and a hunger for participative, community-based solutions to common problems.
unMonastery-in-a-box uses digital tools to multiply the impact of local projects, and encourages locally-tailored replication with consistent evaluation and access to existing expertise. By taking an open source approach to projects, it iterates rather than copies in each locality, with each repetition the model improves and develops in response to each place’s need.
Evaluation will be upfront in the model allowing for common metrics to be used across projects, and for the live-time updating of how each project is doing along standardised measures.
With a peer-to-peer ethos, it will build on and develop a network both of ideas and people without the need for funding a central hub.
unMonastery projects will benefit from connection to others with similar ambitions and ideas, supportive challenge to the work they want to do, better evidence of success and measurement of progress, and a route to share their work and good ideas with the wider community.”
The Should:
-Highlight other possible funding sources for in-a-box and help support the application process.
The Could:
-We’ve already done a ton to build the unMonastery, we should begin to write this up into easily consumable and sharable pattern languages.
-Help us a establish a team to work on in-a-box in advance of funding.
The Would:
-Start mapping out precise technical requirements and scoping the build.
unMonastery Growing Friends and Family:
We’re steadily building an interesting network of friends of unMonastery and people who already run organisations or projects that want to get involved or offer support where they can.
Ted from Citizens without Borders and Teiku (http://citizenswithoutbordersdotcom.wordpress.com/ and http://www.tekiu.com/) recently approached us to run a Citizens Without Borders event focused on unMonastery.
Dr Petra Lange-Berndt has asked me to speak about unMonastery on her course ‘Forming Collectives’ at UCL in the winter. Here’s the reading list I suggested for her students:
1. http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=22397 (obviously not the whole book but… this summary of the book might be useful: http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/monasticism-and-neoliberalism-on-agambens-the-highest-poverty/)
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
An amazing allie in the form of Common Futures (http://commonfutures.eu/) or https://twitter.com/CommonFutrs approached the unMonastery a month ago, she has an unbelievable amount to teach us and is already building bridges for the EdgeRyders network. Fortunately for LOTE she will be in attendance at the conference.
I’ve also been in an ongoing conversation with Noel Hatch of European Alternatives (http://www.euroalter.com/) and a contributor to EdgeRyders about possible collaborations, something is sure to happen in the not too distant future as a result.
I know I’m definitely not the only one who’s having these conversations, Nadia for instance has been meeting with people all over the place and building bridges, likewise a number of EdgeRyders and unMonasterians were at Rome’s Maker Faire this weekend and judging by the tweets all kinds of connections were made!
The Should:
-Share with us on this thread who you’ve been speaking too and where opportunities might arise for collaboration.
-Friends and Family of unMonastery needn’t just be those building the project, there are many ways in which we might build strong and weak ties with other organisations or individuals. If you know someone or something that might be keen to connect with unMonastery or EdgeRyders don’t hesitate.
The Could:
-Reach out to people at random who you believe could make for interesting collaborators or even partnerships - this is all made considerably easy with the explanatory material we’ve been producing of late, such as: http://www.unmonastery.eu/press-releases/1-ENG/
The Would:
-Create a friends of or fellowship network of individuals that can help support, mentor and leverage the unMonastery project.