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:
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pushed out the former Edgeryders director responsible for a lot of the drama and lack of transparency.
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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.