You … are trying to build tech for interoperability, whereas in Edgeryders we are focusing on building a plausible social contract that would involve people (a community) as they produce and use data. So in a way you are creating pipelines for connections, we are creating an interoperability-ready “island” that is sustainable. By this I mean: we are trying to build a social contract that makes sense even before the fully interoperable world has been created.
I presume this is still the overall agreement?
You (well, Elf at least, I don’t know Victor so well) are trying to build tech for interoperability, whereas in Edgeryders we are focusing on building a plausible social contract that would involve people (a community) as they produce and use data. So in a way you are creating pipelines for connections, we are creating an interoperability-ready “island” that is sustainable. By this I mean: we are trying to build a social contract that makes sense even before the fully interoperable world has been created.
Yes, John. Of course, each person has their own model of what Edgeryders is. Me, I am still stuck in The Virtual Community by @Howard_Rheingold, with a hint of 6th century Western monasticism: I do what I do to contribute building a space where people can live, work and learn together, on the basis of a more-or-less aligned understanding of what should and can be done. This turns out to be really difficult, because even low-overhead, efficient endeavours like Edgeryders have coordination costs, and someone has to saddle them, or the shared space will break down. The idea of building a social enterprise on top of the community is a way to address this issue. But social enterprises, too, are subject to mission drift, and the risk of refocusing on supporting the structure rather than pursuing the ultimate goals is high. For this reason, we also try to build a shared recognition that people in Edgeryders are broadly aligned, and it makes sense even at the individual level to carry some small coordination cost. This involves trying to endow Edgeryders with a sense of place; an idea that people who roam these (mostly virtual, as Howard would say) rooms are probably people you could only not get along with, but work with to stay afloat as humans in a turbulent world. Small success just yesterday: the generous @msanti has decided to cover the cost of accommodation for two more community members to attend 32C3 (ER LBG is paying for 10).
So, while we recognise the value in @elf_Pavlik's dream of a totally interoperable web, where we can seamlessly work together no matter where we are on the web, we prioritise trying to evolve a community where openness, trust and courage are the norm – in the game-theoretical sense that you do not get punished or cheated upon for adopting them. And the resources for tweaking the code base are, alas, always too scarce.
Yes, Edgeryders is Drupal. Our customisation of Drupal 7 is downloadable from GitHub.
Fast forward a bit and the idea of fostering inter-project collaboration was articulated by Matt in this comment.
Where the Edgeryders online-offline platform is showing promise is in getting people to collectively bridge the huge gap between a novel idea and a successfully executed project. The first example of this potential was in the evolution of unMonastery from an idea in a conversation in Strasbourg to a working prototype in Matera (see article in Dazed and Confused for quick overview).
The next step is to learn how to do this in such ways that the projects are self-sustaining. That is that the outputs they generate compensate people sufficiently for inputs required to get the projects off the ground…and keep them there. This means better understanding which social mix is needed, and how to make it worthwhile for those profiles to make an investment into the initiative. So far what seems to work is actually building projects like OpenCare which bring bridging and linking capacity.
They also serve to offset some (far from of the main hidden costs involved in doing this: coordination, helping people improve their communication skills and fundraising/sales.
Maybe it makes sense to take the opportunity to think about the above in the context of OpenCare, make some strategic changes/improvements in how we do things based on our hypotheses…and if the results are promising then see how we can build them into the platform at large?
I think the UnMonastery was impressive. All that work with Matera (which I read about in the New Yorker Magazine last spring), EdgeSense, OpenEthnographer - all great stuff.
Open Care though looks to me an order of magnitude bigger and more important. So, “Maybe it makes sense to take the opportunity to think about the above in the context of OpenCare, make some strategic changes/improvements in how we do things based on our hypotheses…and if the results are promising then see how we can build them into the platform at large?” makes sense to me.