@fortyfoxes, @K and all VA nice people in Matera, an opportunity has come up.
I am not sure of the details myself, but @piersoft received an offer from a crowd called Coderdojo in Bologna. They offered to come to Matera and to a two-days of teaching to code to 7-13 year olds, for free (though they do need to have their travel covered). Is this something you could integrate with the VA?
I have never come across the CoderDojo crowd, and don’t really know enough to have a conversation about this: it might be a bad match for all I know, I am just writing to suggest that you guys (David, Ksenia, Piero-Piersoft) meet up, so that Piero can explain. Piero lives in Lecce but is originally from Matera and is in town quite often so you could meet in realspace. According to people I respect, these guys are really good at creating engagement and fun, so they might be an additional bullet thrown at the Piccianello event.
Meeting up with Piero is a good idea anyway for the VA, and the sooner the better
I think this is solid. It would be great if the guys from Bologna come down for the Coder Dojo. My understanding is that the proposal is that the Viral Academy cover the accommodation and transport costs for this group which unMonastery have budgeted €1,000 for.
This won’t be strictly possible, as the Viral Academy does not have money in the budget for a May event. This has now been rescheduled for the September Open Culture event (possibly to coincide with LOTE4). That’s where the money is best spent, and that’s what we’ve agreed with the funders.
However we do have a small budget for teachers, and we could use this budget. Simply put Viral Academy can sponsor 3 residency months to enable the extension of the unMonastery, and unMonastery can then use some of the budget it has saved to sponsor the guys coming down from Bologna.
This works for everyone. It supports Viral Academy in it’s teaching technology objective, and it costs no one any money.
With @ArthurD we can take care of the bureaucratic interface. I think this is going to be quite simple because of Edgeryders LBG acting as a compensation chamber. We would effectively be meeting all our obligations with Matera and more: if the plan works for the VA and works for @Ben, it certainly works for me.
Having discussed this with @fortyfoxes and @kei - it seems to me like a great form of collaboration between VA, OTS and unMonastery. We also had a really interesting presentation last night with David in conversation with Feleci (sp?) about how the VA is going to be working with the Kung Fu school and how it could potentially bring many people into contact with unMonastery in a natural way.
We need to figure out a few of the bureaucratic details and ensure it aligns with the ongoing conversation around bringing on new unMonks to the project but I’ll follow up in more detail at some point tomorrow - right now I’ve got my plate a little full with administration pains.
**I wanted to make a note to mention that there was some discussion in the community call today about using the VA methodology to share skills across the various EdgeRyders projects - I thought it could create some interesting links given that the essential component is a hangout. Anyway I’ll leave it at that for now.
VA methodology to share skills across EdgeRyders projects
Great Ben. Yes, lets build on this synergy. Yesterday - or was it the day before - time here in Matera lacks an NTP server - we discussed the Open Source Day that we are planning with @marc and @kei. The aim is to run this when @kei has sorted out her VISA issues. This looks best set after 12 June. So it looks like we are beginning to structure a series of events leading up to September, punctuated by regular training courses building on the work that @kei has done with the open tech school.
Let’s open up the discussion here on EdgeRyders about how this should work, and go with flow of what people here feel is the best strategy.
From Viral Academy point of view it is simple - it is a publicly funded project and we want to get the best value for money in terms of teaching people who really need these skills, and / or to further develop a new methodology which can deliver this training to the people who need it.
We have budgeted for a small monthly stipend for core teachers of £500 a “course”. This equates to about the same as a monthly stipend for unMonastery given a VA Course is about 6 weeks online teaching. So we can use this teaching budget to sponsor the stipends of unMonastarians for the planned extension of the project - as long as the sponsored projects provide the same value for money in terms of teaching technology.
From the applicants and unMonastery point of view this is also a good thing. It’s not like anyone is going to be asked to teach according to someone else’s agenda. It is a very very open proposal. First Viral Academy “courses” are project based - so anyone doing a project that involves technology is fine. Second the applicant does not need to be a technology expert, as long as you want to pass on knowledge to local people that’s great. Third the whole idea is to provide active online support to the “teachers” and projects - so both the unMonastery and the individual applicant should benefit from this technical support for their project.
In the next week we’ll be posting a bunch of stuff abut the project, and hope to get as much feedback and guidance as we can from people here. So let’s start the conversation.
@Ben asks us to share our thoughts, and here is mine: this looks like a win situation all around. We get to do the CoderDojo thing – which is not only useful in itself, but doubly useful because it materializes a collaboration between the unMonastery and the local civic hacker lord @piersoft; we end up funding it with VA money, which buys as even more political capital in town; we align @Kei and other OTS enthusiasts with the VA trajectory; and we build a set of activities over a fairly long period of time, that benefit both the local community in Matera and the VA itself. What’s not to like?
You’ll have to explain me the Kung Fu thing. Sorry, let me rephrase that: you don’t have to explain it, but I am curious.
Not everyone following unMonastery group follows this one!
@fortyfoxes just pointed out this thread to me, i hope no one assumes that everyone following unMonatery group follows this one as well! I see it relevant to unMonatery and would recommend in the future attach it to both groups. thanks
We may talk about it more with @Ben, @ArthurD and others in the house, maybe event record video from presenting iteration on this idea and post it in those two groups!
