Well, you are most welcome to visit, except that currently I am back in Armenia and involved in several projects that imply social good for the local communities, Armenian Redwood Project being one of them.
Though ER is indeed the right space to develop a culture of conversation, I do hope to make it to LOTE5 and meet you in person!
Cheers
Indeed we will
What are you doing for the Redwood Project? How is their fundraising going? I made a “Good Samaritan” donation to show some support.
Thanks for your interest and the donation! 
Right now I’m helping several newly arrived vulnerable families to integrate, acting like a social worker, finding them accommodation, placing the kids at schools and orientation/training for the adults to find jobs to become sustainable in the long run.
I am also writing blog posts for ARP blog about the process of integration and possible paths to sustainability for the Syrian-Armenian refugees in Armenia as well as success stories of the families.
Later I’m going to focus on the affordable housing project, trying to design a sustainable solution for the vulnerable families seeking refuge in Armenia.
We currently work on a fundraising campaign which will be out this Christmas. The founder of the project has a huge network of Armenian Diaspora that supports the cause but we need to act quick now as UN considers cutting the subsidies for the refugees in 2016, and if we don’t raise enough money some 10.000 refugees will be left without help here in Armenia. By the way Armenia is the third European country with the biggest number of displaced people from Syria.
Would be happy to share more info if needed.
I need to get back in the box
Dear @johncoate,
As a hippiechild born from the local May '68 movement, all I ever wanted was to be normal, mainstream and employed. This morning, I find myself to be a writer, one of the organizers of an event called FuckUp Nights Brussels and in the same tribe as you. I’m so confused. How did it come to this.
leaves to comfort herself with some good Destiny’s Child singalongs
Ps: Is there any chance you’ll come to LOTE5 in February? I’ll provide a guitar and show you the good biking tours…
LOTE5
Yes it is my plan to come. Very much looking forward to it.
I looked at FuckUp Nights awhile back - very cool project. I have certainly had my share of them, although not all in a business sense…
Hello!
John, a warm welcome to ER.
Your (re?)arrival on the edge has inspired me to login and post here myself after quite some absence. Mainly - and you will have to forgive my indulgence- because its an opportunity to contact someone i am indebted too in many ways. I still remember when and where it was that i read Cyberspace Innkeeping.
2000 I was sitting at my families shared ‘beige box’ pentium computer, i was ~15 and meant to be doing my homework… Instead I was running a phpbbs that was THE focal point for the local punk scene in my run down British seaside home town… it was the most important thing in the world to me at the time.
The experience of running that website and community, it’s associated zine, (remember them anyone?) and booking gigs, and tours taught me everything i understand about what mutually cooperative communities could be when empowered by the net. However it was that essay that was passed around my friends at the time that has since shaped everything i have ever done when working with others and building mutual teams. That line ‘When you log into an online service, you use new tools for an ancient activity.’ is still as true now as it was then. All the subheadings in that document should still resonate with people across this website when thinking about starting something new or cool and can be used as jumping off themes for discussion.
I am extremely grateful for the opportunities and the friendships i have made though ER, and im excited to see the outcomes of the work on the 4 key tasks in the ‘Failing forward’ post the other day and very much looking forward to seeing how the community grows and devlopes once these important challenges have been er ’ bureaucractised’.
anyways. Welcome aboard!
This made my day
Seriously. Thank you so much for saying this. I wrote that piece a log time ago and I have kept it on my website nonstop in hopes that the very thing you described would happen. And I love that you passed it around with your friends in the local punk scene.
Cool to see you here! Watched “your movie” a while back, and just read your principles. The last line looks suspiciously simple. 
The easiest things to say
are often the hardest things to do…
Walking the talk
This is not just any introduction, John. The fact that you’ve spent the last weeks accommodating to the space and reading historic documentation of Edgeryders says a lot, I mean, that level of attention. We will have a lot to learn just by “reading” you in action… Attention and empathy is something I feel we are missing lately (and the “conversation” you referenced above), mostly on the Internet in general - the ability to cool off and just spend time listening to each other. The sense of trade-off between doing that and getting things done (more bureaucratic as Jay says?) is, for me personally, permanent. But I guess that differentiates the pros from amateurs, or less experienced :-) Will see you soon for sure, welcome!
Again, easy things to say are often hard to do
This is an unusual and pretty special group. You all have been doing this for a few years already and have already done important, meaningful projects, yet it still feels like a young organism with far more ahead than was has already happened. You are a self-described group of “do-ers.” The orientation is toward projects, most of which need some level of financial support. To consistently pull that off, there has to be structure and responsibility. And yet it is heavily populated with free spirits. The company overlaying with the community is an interesting structure that I think will always have some tension around hierarchy and governance.
One of the conundrums of online groups is the inevitability of conflict. That is endemic to all groups forming up, but this is a medium where conflict is inherently hard to resolve. In the past couple of days I read a number of conversations here where this showed itself. In a group of free spirited self-starters like this, falling into arguments is just going to happen, especially when putting together projects and defining group governance.
I have wrestled with this problem for years and I don’t have easy answers except to make sure that everyone recognizes the inherent difficulty of resolving conflicts in online conversation and resolves to oversupply understanding. Give slack in abundance. We’re functioning in a limited environment based on words and word choice. (As an aside I have to marvel at everyone’s ability to articulate in English when it isn’t your native language), and yet we know that there is more than words going on. Old hippie that I am, I still call them vibes - the unseen energy that travels between people. The thing that blew me away about online conversations way back when I first got into this, is that vibes magically travel through the wires and ether along with the words. But they are bound together with the words chosen to convey them. Nevertheless, those vibes are going to influence reactions and those reactions may or may not get properly articulated in the words of a response.
Some people are better than others at choosing those words. Some people can make their point quickly with economy and some people can’t. Some people are happier or more irritated at a given moment. Some people have a pressing other issue crowding their mind while they are trying to focus on a conversation here. Some know and see each other outside of online (“in person”) to varying degrees. And some people have existing outside relationships with each other that influence what they say, and others in the conversation might not know what “baggage” they may be bringing with them.
Again, I have never found a good way to deal with it other than to really try to understand what someone is trying to say and give them a lot of slack. Hopefully over time I will get where they are coming from. And plenty of times I have said the wrong thing and caused a bad feeling in someone that took a long time to work out, if it ever got worked out at all - many did and many did not.
As an aside, it is a very good thing that you have face-to-face meetings built into the core of ER. The blend of online and F2F creates a kind of social alloy - very strong if the people involved still like each other after the early rush of those first gatherings.
I’m not talking about trolls or people who seem to be here just because they need someone to pay attention to them, although they too are inevitable and always suck some of the energy for themselves, or try to. I’m saying that this is a complex and deep relationship-building endeavor where, as it says in the I Ching, perseverance furthers.
Also I have a Facebook page
I don’t love FB and I know that I am part of the product there rather than a customer, member, whatever. But it’s useful as a way to stay in touch with people I already know, and their photo gallery thing is reasonably useful. FB is a lousy place to build relationships - it’s brilliance is that it reinforces relationships that already exist.
Anyway, here is my page which I think anyone can see containing lots of photos, many from the way old days, most more recent: Redirecting...
Great to see John doing this!
I’ve seen John through all of the adventures, starting with the WELL, and just want to attest to what unique experience he has – plenty of online community-builders in the world (although he was the first online community manager), a few people were involved when news media first got online, plenty of people have been involved with online communities for young people and/or avatar-based, many have been community-tech advisors to nonprofits, a few have had the privilege of helping EFF, more than a few have run public radio stations – but John is the only one who has succeeded at all of these enterprises. Will follow this next chapter with interest.
Good omens all around
Thank you so much, @Howard_Rheingold, your endorsement carries a lot of weight – though it seems @johncoate has won quite a few fans of his own already in Edgeryders.
We’ll do our very best to dream up something to do together. And you too, Howard, are of course welcome to step in. 
Always happy to deal with John!
Thank you, Alberto. I am mostly retired now, working as a full-time artist, with one important exception: I’m always up to collaborating with John!
While you have been reading a lot of the background, you may not know that there was a number of posts that were deleted during one split that took place around 5-6 years ago.
This split was caused by some of the Directors of the Edgryders LBG Company, taking the credit for work that they didn’t do, as well as the understandable reactions to this behaviour.
I was trying to mediate, and find an amicable solution to some of this, but i could not, as the deleted posts were never re-instated, so it was not possible to find out what had really happened. I subsequently found out more of what had taken place from personal conversations with some of the people involved, but i have still not been able to find out the full story.
It was not the disagreement that caused the split. The split was the reaction to the subsequent cover-up.
This also took place at the same time as the election of the directors to the EdgerydersLBG Company.
The EdgerydersLBG was a legal shell that was supposed to be available to the community for general use, and was supposed to work with community over-sight. There was supposed to be a community choice as to the new directors who were to act as community over-sight, but instead, the new directors were directly chosen by the current directors of the EdgerydersLBG company. This was imposed directly with no input from the Edgeryders community, and when i subsequently checked the company structures, the main shareholders of the EdgerydersLBG company, were the directors themselves, no-one else.
This basically meant that all of the rhetoric that was used about doing things differently, was lies, as the directors /owners of the company were behaving as autocratically as the institutions that they were railing against.
This was also the reason that a lot of the members from the UK left the Edgeryders community, as the behaviour of the directors of EdgerydersLBG was just “business-as-usual-with-a-different-set-of-faces-in-charge.”
If you want to get the full story, contact Vinay Gupta and he will be able to fill you in on the missing details, that have been disappeared down the Memory Hole.
I have talked with Vinay
but he felt no need to tell me any of this. Maybe he thought it was water under the bridge. I don’t know. Groups often have rocky starts. But are you telling me this now as a warning? What is the point you wish to make with this?
A lie by omission is still a lie, and, unacknowledged, hidden problems remain as problems, even though they are hidden.
The directors of the EdgerydersLBG that behaved in this manner, were Alberto, Nadia, and Noemi. The director that was appointed without any attention being paid to community oversight was Patrick. While all of this was going on, Matthias was in Nepal.
I dug through the historical records that i still have access to, and, none of the information about this issue has been re-instated.
This wasn’t a “rocky start”, but something that took place after it had been running for a few years.
The fact that this is still unacknowledged, and hidden, means that all of the talk about transparency, and, responsibility towards the community, is still untrue, as this has never been resolved.
It also means that, should a similar situation come about, then the people involved could behave in the same manner, which will mean that they could fuck over the community members, and then deny it took place, just like last time.
I’m posting this as a warning.
You and every other community member needs to watch your back.
If they had been open about this, had admitted their errors, and made reparations, then i wouldn’t have to write this, as it would be part of the historical record of how people in an organisation screwed up, and then fixed things.
Since this has not been done, and, they are still in denial about the problem, then they are making sure that this can happen again, and again.
One housing co-operative that i was a member of, 25 years ago, had a slightly different problem, but used a very different approach towards resolving it. The Chairperson, and the Vice-Chairperson, disppeared to India with 90% of the co-op’s funds. Some of the members put a large amount of effort into cleaning up the mess that was left behind, documented how this fraud had taken place, and, changed the co-ops constitution & policies, to make sure that this form of fraud could not happen again. This co-operative is still running 45 years after it started.
This was a complete contrast towards the way that the EdgerydersLBG company were, and still are, doing things.
If you are comfortable with the situation as it stands, then there’s no problem.
If you, and the other community members, did not know that this had taken place, then there is a problem, as the lesson has not been learned, and the potential for fraud will continue to exist.
Closure was brought about
For the occasional reader, uninterested as she might be, this refers to a divergence about how to develop the unMonastery project. This happened after the prototype had folded and moved out of Matera, in late 2014. Billy here was not involved in the unMonastery itself that I recall. Divergence begat frustration and frustration begat a lot of bickering and people feeling hurt and putting up drama, myself included. During this, things heated up. Some people broke badly netiquette, and we banned them, as netiquette advises. But then, we:
pushed out the former Edgeryders director responsible for a lot of the drama and lack of transparency.
made an effort to improve governance and increase transparency. This includes publishing legal and financial information; the statute of incorporation; making netiquette more explicit; explaining we have our own internal admin group (d’oh) and how it works; adopting an explicit policy for bestowing admin powers over the website and setting up an advisory board where people from the community have full access to all information and participate in the governance. This latter was a failure: after the controversy died down, no one was that interested in working with us, making us proposals, etc.
During all this, in January 2015 some of the people that had participated in the unMonastery prototype in Matera incorporated a company called unMonastery. Nadia and I were offered by Ben Vickers to become members, in explicit recognition of our contribution to the new endeavor and as a way to bring about closure to this mess. We turned down the offer, but wished them well, and we did so publicly. We also reserved the right to continue developing the idea on our own. With that, closure was achieved, as far as I am concerned.
We never heard from them again. But Companies House records show that Vinay resigned as director in August 2015; Ben Vickers resigned in October 2015. The company has now a single director, Arthur Doohan, whom I no longer trust.
Meanwhile, the lessons from the unMonastery have produced The Reef. The Reef is very concrete. We have a prototype. I live in it. It’s not funded by grants. It might fail, and if it does we will learn from that failure too.
Other people can, and hopefully will, take the unMonastery lesson in other directions. We try to help and support a bit those who do. For example, we took part in the preMonastery experience in Galway, championed them vis-a-vis the organisation in charge of delivering the Galway 2020 Capital of Culture programme and hired Bernard, the driving force behind it, for a small gig.
Our principles are lofty ones. It is difficult to live up to them. I would argue the Edgeryders core group, though deeply imperfect, does this better than any other group I have been involved with, and I am incredibly proud of being a part of it. I would also argue that time has shown that we were always more interested in building things than in fighting for their control.
useful history
I’d like to thank @Alberto for this piece of history. It explains a lot… I’ve been on the edges of the EdgeRyders community twice: once pre-Matera, and now again, but never yet met up with people face-to-face. (Though I am looking forward to attending LOTE6 and meeting people there!)
Thinking of the “fork” that @Alberto mentioned, before the “fork” I felt that EdgeRyders was indeed edgy, occasionally too edgy for comfort. Though I couldn’t see where, I felt a background tension. Interesting to learn now that it was partly at least around the unMonastery at Matera. Before @Billy_Smith brought up the issue recently, after the “fork” I had a sense that EdgeRyders had now found a more stable mode of existence, and that (interestingly enough) focused around interpersonal relationships and care, with technology and social experiment less up front (though still being a vital ingredient. There is no claim to anything objective here, I’m just reporting my personal impressions.
People do tend to look for historical explanations of the present. When things change, there is always the question of why and how they have changed. I do, genuinely and very deeply, support transparency. But I think there needs to be care here as well. Transparency is not just about what happened at a physical level; and it is more than what happened to be written down anywhere. There is a deeply personal aspect to transparency, and I see it as being connected to the narratives we tell ourselves. I believe that we can only achieve collective transparency when those personal narratives are shared and received, and that means firstly that the individuals need to have enough trust to share them (can be difficult), and secondly that others take the time and trouble to listen deeply and reflectively (i.e. reflecting back openly what has been heard) until the person sharing feels truly heard. I understand this as part of the essence of Restorative Circles. If you put in the word “needs” then you’re pretty close to NVC.
I still wonder if we would collectively do well to hear out the conflict more in a RC manner. I personally would imagine finding it deeply instructive. I’m with @Billy_Smith in the desire to mediate, and I would hope he would be with me in the desire for the matter to be healed more deeply.