After finishing our short experiment in community building, we propose a follow up of Futurespotters to actually work on projects discovered in the network: projects that members have or new ones, and help Bucharest walk the path of open, online grassroots collaboration. In the follow up project we want to bring Edgeryders from all over the world to Bucharest and set up a residency and project lab. We have a track record of building hackers residencies - in the unMonastery project.
Our story for Futurespotters Lab is: we need to figure out new ways of living, working and being in collectivity - we as a society are trapped between post-communist meanings of “collective” (term being highly discredited) and the liberalism that governs contemporary culture and makes individuals drift farther from each other. Bucharest seems isolated enough to try out wild things and lead the way, but also close enough to “Europe” to look into what works and what doesn’t in co-working and co-living models.
This was the story, going well with the Microtopia programme in the Bucharest 2021 bidbook. Now, while Futurespotters Lab is listed and written as a project for Bucharest European Capital of Culture 2021, we haven’t heard back officially, and chances are we won’t, as the ARCUB team seems to be restructuring and running against time.
I pitched this project idea to other edgeryders and we wrote in a shorter version in a funding application for Advocate Europe call for ideas granting 50K eur to the winner: https://advocate-europe.eu/en/idea-space#!/r/advocate-europe/2016/proposal_0000489/ (you can help with a vote if you like it?)
This is a network graph of the Edgeryders global community. Pink nodes are community members in the current Futurespotters Bucharest (not yet a physical lab) - we see them as subcommunity in Edgeryders global, but firmly connected to the centre of the network too. More about the Edgeryders live visualization.
Futurespotters Lab is a blend of physical and virtual, international and local residency that reinvents modern collectivity - by co-living, co-working and stewarding underused assets. It’s a sandbox for the potential that creative individuals have (everyone of us), given time, space and means to (1) take up meaningful work, (2) work collectively to solve societal challenges and (3) engage deeply with immediate surroundings, while having their work augmented in a virtual international community.
Initial version of the proposal here.
With @Natalia Skoczylas we also want to look into partnerships in the ex-soviet/ ex-communist region and maybe get it started in other countries instead. If you want to join as a partner, or want to run with versions of the proposal somewhere else, just say so below. Cheers!