Building Lote after first Community Call

Workspaces LOTE3 “The unPilgrimage”
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A summary of our hangout on Friday 21st of June, with @Auli, @andrea_paoletti, @bembo_davies, @daniel, @dorotea, @emkay, @nadia, @noemi, @eimhin.

At Lote we want to become better, faster, stronger, more well resourced together.

How are we going to do this? by creating a Guide to Making Meaningful Projects Happen, a resource handbook, and every event track is a kick ass contribution to it. A multitude of stakeholders would use it as a tool for their own purposes - individuals with projects on their own, supporting communities, policy makers wanting to see more projects like unMonastery happening… What we would need to do:

1. Prepare content & proposal for how the Guide to Making Projects Happen should look like.

As Dorotea said, this needs to be done in advance, collaboratively, otherwise onsite you risk ending up with “trying to figure out how to do things instead of really doing them”. Daniel suggests to get some kind of toolspace on the net for people to work on before and after the event to make everything more fluid, dynamic. We need to come up with guidelines to write the document & a structure on where to put things eg identifying ideas in simple diagrams –can we get people around to help with this?

What should be in it? Edgeryders already have been in conversation on a variety of topics: Making a Living, Creating Commons, Participating in Democracy, Resilience etc, plus there are more recent themes - see the Burning Edge or Developing better software for collaboration… We can explore any of these and more.

2. We need to surface points where we can couple Lote with the unMonastery agenda, and raise support from locals in Matera.

Bembo recommends that we separate Edgeryders and unMonastery as the flagship project. Would like Materans to see that something has actually happened, that we injected change. What are the practical things we want to do and how does that become the backbone of the unMonastery? Andrea can be a positive interface because he’s also building networks locally, and we can assist him by delivering periodic summaries of what is happening on Edgeryders and where activities can converge; would help communicate better with the people of Matera.

3. Practical coordination

We agreed that we’ll coordinate on the Edgeryders platform, using posts and tasks, with possibility to integrate new functionalities for collaborative documents & diagrams. A suggestion has been made to look into DrupalCon Prague… Got thoughts on how we can organise lote effectively, as a distributed network?

See you at our next hangout, always here: http://goo.gl/JuNFc

More about community calls & why you should get involved

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Remember that I am a dramatist; we work by building antagonistic rhetorical positions and letting two seemingly opposing voices hammer out truths.
 
I will take the position that the cultivating change documentation is in good hands and will thrive wherever it may occur.  I'll interpret my active role as to nurture and protect the growth of unMO-Matera, hopefully I will slowly allow myself to be convinced that by placing LOTE#3 there, instead of its planned grand opening can be made very useful to the unMOM's future health.  The writing I put out yesterday is an attempt to sketch a scenario as to how this can happen.  It is based upon Ben's stated desire to keep 20-30 people in Matera for a week or so after the LOTE.  I immediately questioned the social dynamics of being left behind with the clean up without having had any pre LOTE imput.  My suggestion was that this be either before or before AND after, so that the group both feels and functions as hosts. We'll talk through this a few times.  I have no idea as to the economics or uneconomics of these choices.
 
Central to my way of thinking about social choreography is how the rituals of the human gathering reinforce the message of the meeting.  A few simple gestures can seed the culture of the unMOM in a manner that enriches the entire life of the project.  Can we get hold of enough small rugs?
 
PS: I thought about the idea of multiple flagships and realised that metaphor can be dangerous.  Flagships are those that house central spirit/command and send out messages to the fleet.  They are the senior example of a full functioning enterprise that all future expansions look to for inspiration.
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I agree on the fact that the 20-30 people should be there before or before and after the LOTE, although I don’t know if it is possible logistically-speaking. On the other hand, if the venue can be ready for end of October, why not one week before? The only thing that pops up is: are we sure the unMonastarians will have the time and space to actually dedicate themselves to these skill sharing workshops? Isn’t there a risk of being absorbed by the preparations of the LOTE? I guess this is part of the unMon hosting the LOTE anyways :slight_smile:

Concerning the Human Rites (btw your English is really something!). Although you’ve got a point regarding the importance of the gesture and the action in bulding the signification, I was wondering if deciding already that the unMonastery is organized around a cycle of fiests isn’t going to have the opposite effect. As an anthropologist, i know how much celebrative events create ties and bondage, but at the same time aren’t they the result of necessity and time? For example, shouldn’t celebrations emerge spontaneously in the flow? For example, the 1st year of the unMon? Also, there will be celebrative moments in the hosting communities: Matera and the 2d of July, for example, is something not to be underestimated :slight_smile: I just feel that there is a risk of over-conceptualization (wow, that’s a long word) and detachment from what the focus of the unMon really is. Celebrations also go with organization, or did I get you wrong?

On the other hand I really think that the fact of opening up every two weeks is something necessary: it brings me back to what you so rightly said in Matera, during the first unMon, concerning the 4 levels of interaction. Knowing the southern culture, i really think that aggregative moments are going to be the way to break the initial ice.

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An open letter to Materans from ER?

I’ve started to give this some thinking, as we need to start paving the way long before we go there, and also keeping a humble attitude. I wonder if you guys would take a read at an invitation I’ve drafted, at least check if the angle is suited and would be received warmly. I wouldn’t strive to add all the details in this first invitation, rather put the emphasis on why we are coming and the added value Matera has for us  (Ilaria do you remember we talked about a blog post at one point? well this could be somehting, I thought writing it as an open letter and sign it off as the Edgeryders community could increase the honesty…). What do you guys think?

https://edgeryders.eu/node/1352