This is a post written on behalf of Edgeryders Lbg* and comes after two of our company directors - @Nadia and @Alberto - recently received invitations to become members of unMonastery Lbg organization registered in January 2015. As we understood, the invitation was made in recognition of the work they put into the unMonastery first iteration. Although they considered, none of them accepted the offer.
We’d like to clarify to all who have been asking, or are still wondering, that Edgeryders Lbg and unMonastery Lbg are now two distinct organisations with distinct directorships and leaderships. The companies can have directors, and already have members (equivalent to shareholders in a conventional company, but they have no right to dividends) that individually and informally remain close to both networks.
Often, in the life of a project, there comes a time when some of the people behind it think they could do better by creating a version of it that incorporates some differences in structure, or goals. Hackers call this a fork, and generally consider it a good thing, because the community gets two projects instead of one, and each person can gravitate towards the project she feel closest to. Forks have typically at least two prongs, and we at Edgeryders are still fascinated with the unMonastery idea. We agree that many things in the Matera iteration should be improved, and we have some ideas over where to start.
So, we reserve our right to develop other future projects called “unMonastery [name]” depending on where it will take place, and encourage anyone, anywhere, at any time, to do the same in the spirit of open culture. We commit to clearly marking new unMonasteries as developed by Edgeryders, to avoid confusion. Those projects will be subjected to EdgeRyders social contract, keeping the concept, name, domain name, logo and brand in the commons. Under no circumstances will new iterations aim to influence the number, design choices or other characteristics of other unMonastery Lbg driven projects, and we expect the reciprocal to be the same, unless a partnership is established.
We wish unMonastery Lbg well and we stand proud that collective efforts of people from all over the Internet are paying off in newfound paths, projects, modes of self-organisation. Since membership in an organisation bears responsibility upon the person holding it and ourselves having learned a lot (and messed up!) since Edgeryders incorporation, we really welcome all of you involved in the new setup to reach out should you need it. We keenly recommend you avoid, in the future, our past errors of centralising information, lack of transparency and trusting the wrong people. In love, we have to observe that the forking process itself was quite untransparent, and are quite worried that you are headed for the same mistakes we made. In view of this situation, it is probably best we do not try too hard to work together until the main issues are worked out. To avoid wasting people’s time here as we did in the past, we make ourselves available for chats.
Other than that, so long and here’s to new futures!
Further references
The names of people involved in the Edgeryders company are here.
The names of people involved in the unMonastery company can be found here.
*In British company law, Lbg is a private company limited by guarantee.
This blog post was contributed by Noemi and Alberto. Photo credit: Face_me_pls on flickr.com
