I can help in different ways: Marketing side: give to this Online Summit the pre-visibility it needs and bring people in. Technical side: If needed I can manage or teach how to manage a video mixer software for live streams so we can give to all of this a professional look. Network side: I can ask a couple of EU friends in businesses like commerce or Saas (software as a service) if they want to participate and show their experience (if they have something interesting to tell of course).
Always thinking about this area I would suggest, where possible, to have another format: one or two main events with one or two big names for a high profile “lectio magistralis”/round table/ speech / [put what you prefer the most here].
The first names that come to my mind are Yanis Varoufakis (I would love to see him and, for eg. Fabrizio Barca, around the same table discussing the near future), but also Naomi Klein in this situation would be interesting like Edward Snowden (not sure if they want to be paid for this). But apart from this, the idea to put some big names above a series of other events would be beneficial in my opinion for the entire Online Summit.
Sounds attractive and very ambitious! I have two things I could contribute:
programming support - case study collection and community reporting.
This could be sessions where 1-2 people summarize the coping methods reported in the conversations so far and offer them for others’ to learn and contribute. Threads mostly focus on how people: navigate uncertainty of the work mentally, try to change the way they work and adapt, conclude, learn, project, voice concerns about the future of the world, and maybe others.
content delivery - building a food business from lockdown. Here I would want to work with @yannick to put together an overview as struggling food entrepreneurs ourselves.
Ok - Feedback from Katya (she’s not on edgeryders, mentioning it to be sure to acknowledge her contribution):
This seems like a very timely and worthwhile event. It is certainly a fertile ground for innovation as things post Covid will never be the same as pre Covid.
You outline Wikipedia as an example model. This is often called a folksonomy as a group of people build it for common purpose. But perhaps find another example which has a commercial angle.
The internet is designed for resilience as are many supply chains, can you invite those people into the conversation?
Perhaps talk up the commercial imperative more. Nothing wrong with the altruistic angle, but ultimately profit will drive change and there is plenty to be made when making the world more tolerant of such crisis’
Also want about more resilient financial services? This seems like an important things going forward too.
Making some suggestions to address the commercial imperative.
…form an essential support system for sustaining livelihoods in times of crisis. This support system will ultimately help everyone gain access to new people, tools, opportunities that reduce the constraints of doing good work and create new possibilities for financial stability.
We need to use a similar kind of effect to meet the material, relational, and existential needs of individuals and communities. We want people to gain access to financial stabilily as a basic need and be able to prosper by making good work count: not just a subjective measure, but as a financially rewarded life.
Katya’s brain - These topics can easily veer off towards monoculture and wishful thinking, which would be a waste of everyone’s time. Katya and I have never met, our social, political and ideological views diverge on many points. Something that I appreciate and learn from. I think she could add valuable perspective.
Seda F. Gurses: Post-doc fellow at Department of Electrical Engineering at KU Leuven. She studies new networked systems and optimization of their functions. Which is critical towards understanding the relationship between tech architecture and how we work.
Dimitry Kleiner and the crowd behind CoopCycle - a food delivery app for courier and restaurateur coops.
Also, Mark Graham - Professor at Oxford Internet Institute & Director at the Fair Work Foundation which is auditing & organising platform economy labour.
This Online Summit really looks interesting.
I would like to help on what’s possible to discuss from a food business perspective, seeing also all the different kind of initiatives around me (Enstoemelivery, Home Gourmet, A producer owned distribution coop, …) and the personal struggles & possibilities i’m going through right now.
But when we tackle food & COVID we are touching a quite complex subject.
Yes there is a search for what i cal “localism” within the food industry and part of my fellow niche food entrepreneurs are being able to stay afloat of it. But i don’t know if this is something that is impactful on a societal level, because i think it’s a higher middle class solution.
It’s an ethical question i’m looking into at the moment, while i truely believe in the values our type of niche producers are bringing to the table, will it be able to feed the whole table? Is our model based on time, higher quality & more involvement scale-able to the whole society?
If somebody wants to be part of that discussion to think further about it i would like to be more involved then in structuring the program on that part
And what about the ARTS? i don’t see it pop up in the discussion or am i missing it?
Uf, difficult one. I can only think that adding yet another ethical dimension to the anyway ethics driven work that socially minded entrepreneurs are doing risks leading to self-flagelation. It is commendable though, and humbling, seriously.
ARTS is less present I think because we have not been able to figure out what is really happening there - @bob mentioned some efforts at the big networks’ level, and @MariaEuler, @matteo_uguzzoni and others in the creative field reported on some things, but not so in depth overall. And our Culture Squad is struggling this year from lack of leadership. That said, it’s not missing with intention, so ideas are welcome…
Yes it’s a question of checks and balances i think too. But when i see discussions between good informed and engaged citizens condeming the local producers of not being trough to their value because they are using wix.com and other platforms to sell their products while they should be “investing in small IT firms, as we invest is small food business”, it raised that question.
It’s more in a how can we strengthen each other without the whole morale value contest…
On the cultural field i hear different concerns, it’s also really interesting, but all depend if subsidized, if unionized and even which type of art. I’m most afraid of the world of cinema, but that’s maybe because it’s the one i’m most in contact with
My own changes: Linux perhaps is a better example than wikipedia. It’s a good example of a commons, cooperatively built and sustained by commercial actors that rely on it - IBM, Redhat
Hi, I can help with adapting the announce as well as social networks infos about the online summit for the Polish users. I have ideas and contacts for pre-event introductions and networking. I would like to work on documentation, data analysis, summarizing and presentation of the anthropological research in form of synopsis which allows to learn from others’ past experiences. Please consider me for the deployment of the actions as well.
Hi @everyone My name is Asli Telli and I live in Germany at the moment as an exile academic. I’m a member of Academics for Peace Network, advocating for Peace Front in Turkey and Europe since 2011 (Academics for Peace | Front Line Defenders) and also initiator of Mapping Funds (www.mappingfunds.com) through which my research team maps freedom in academia. I recently co-initiated diverse_precarious network; we are contributing to “hypothesis” knowledge hub on lack of diversity and precarity of knowledge workers: ***Dissent in European (and beyond) higher education*** | Academia
I’m excited to hear your online summit plan and would like to contribute, possibly with a session on the conditions of higher education, knowledge workers as well as students during and beyond corona times. Hope to continue the conversation. Keep up the great work:)
Hi and welcome @atelli
Had a quick look at the mapping funds initiative - Curious to know how did you come to work on this, what sparked it off and what challenges you have been/are coming across along the way?
Re the summit: Yes it would be lovely to have you do a session! Starting with the mapping methodology and exploring how it can be applied to making visible existing support for new forms of livelihood generation. Presenting the results of your findings in the domain of academia, but zooming out to a broader perspective.
You make know that edgeryders started out as a research project on how youth in Europe where coping with the transition to healthy and satisfying adult lives in the aftermath of the financial meltdown. It started out that way but it was clear even then that the young were canaries in the coalmine- the precarisation of growing sections of populations at large. So we took an open approach asking how people, anyone who wanted to participate, were coping with life. How people were trying to make a living, managing our learning, trying to build healthy relationships with others and with ourselves and… practical resilience. The diversity of participation lead to a number of things coming out of this including an experimental initiative in Italy called unMonastery. The diversity I think was due to the zoomed out perspective we took, starting from topics and challenges that matter to everyone. This could lead to novel perspectives, and
collaborations across a number of fields and disciplines… what do you think?
Checking in here concerning the Summit Program
Concerning:
I will dive a bit more in some of the topics within this discussion frame:
Types of mindsets to overcome the crisis within the craft food industrie: “le capital sympathie”, minimizing losses, business as usual, going social
Personal approach: breaking apart each piece of the business, cutting back & not wanting to restart the machine.
Personal approach
Context: starting food business that is taking off, envy of growth, rolling out new opportunities & “professionalization” of the whole enterprise. Loss of 95% of the revenue once the covid crisis goes full throttle.
Now: looking into a much more artistic / social organization structure of the project. I don’t want to put food and business in the same basket anymore. Food projects should be possible within a social approach. So i’m cutting of most of my growth potential, selecting just a few gigs to be able to pay the costs. Cutting back on the loop: more demand → more investments → more costs → needing more clients → more demands…
P.S: i will continue to edit this post, don’t know how to make a draft
Hi Asli, I think it’s a good idea to start from how you conceptualize ‘precarity of knowledge workers’ - I am curious if all higher education falls into that category, or you have zoomed in on specific types of teachers.
Before our scheduled call later today, I would invite you to look at this conversation we had with @seh_notts who is supporting teachers to adopt digital formats for their work at the University in Nothingham, but who also spoke of the difficulties in eLearning for both teachers and students. In that conversation and others on culture, it became clear that everyone is in a crisis, but arts and humanities are in an even more precarious situation. Do you have any distinctions betweek fields or types of workers?
I have created a wiki stub session for you and also added what we have so far - the summary will need to be changed, but you can expand there with all the details coming in.
Can you keep the points which you think the discussion should go into? Those not so important add them in the comments, or discard?
That will help us when we invite new people.
A good date for this event for me is the last week of May, how about for you?
