Some time ago I wrote about my idea of making lote as an open source event/process in a collaborative participatory way. Many Edgeryders’ events happened since then including Spot the Future workshops and community events at unMonastery, so we are collectively gaining more experience.
Designing meaningful fulfilling and constructive events has always been my passion, and every event I co-organised was also a huge learning experience for me.
What I learned and what I would like us to apply in Making lote is - as my favourite events are community driven events - putting the community first. What it means in practice is creating the context where the community is effectively encouraged to contribute to build the event together. That sometimes means a slight moderation by a community manager to enable everyone to contribute, as every person is different and can contribute in a different way and form, but also everyone can bring unique qualities to the shared context and making things happen.
What it gives us is co-maintaining a healthy community where everyone can feel it’s their own event. That includes upskilling in sharing and interpersonal soft skills as well.
Another important practice in making the event is what I call “a meaningful Before and a meaningful After” - like in viewing the event as an open source process - the conversations happen before and after, so that we create together the context where we can support each other in our projects.
Yet another very important thing that Nadia outlined in our Lote “working session” at ouishare fest last week - it’s important that every participant at the event feels like they are supported in their projects by the community and that everyone has the time to share it with others and get support and feedback. So that everyone knows that they will get the attention put on their work they care about and their projects.
Also an ‘ideal space’ for a venue we have came up with in our “working session” would facilitate the community to get together possibly in a place nearby a city, maybe in a countryside so that we could focus on our work and collaboration better, and enable development of projects and meaningful synergies. A place where we could rearrange and adapt to our needs and stay there all together until as late as we need to, cook and share the meals and in general feel comfortable and welcome to make the progress together.
From my ( psychological and well-being ) perspective, what really makes the event special is how we make it together and the magic atmosphere around it. That’s why some emphasis and attention to the community health is always welcome.
I think the way we made lote3 was one of the best practices of making a collaborative events in practice and let’s hope we can do even better for lote4
I’ll keep sharing more ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills and ‘people’ and ‘practical’ related things I learned but not to make this post too long I’ll just add some comments.
Also we are all learning as we are building new lote
See you soon in the lote workspace, that this space is transforming to.
***
Meanwhile I quote my idea of “Lote as a process” description below
Making lote4 starting from lote3.1 alpha - Lote as a process, an open source project – Lote3.1 alpha and Making lote4
Lote ( Living on The Edge ) event is the space where the edgeryders community meet, “usually” once or twice per year. lote3 was a community based effort. Making Lote3 has taught us a lot of valuable skills how to coordinate all the ingredients of the live meeting, mostly via an online collaboration. It was few months of preparations to make Lote3 happen. We have had regular meetings once or sometimes twice or more times per week to keep all the preparations going smoothly. We have built many things collaboratively, like the event site, the program, sometimes fixing many ‘little things’ behind the scenes, and making sure everything works fine. And with the joint effort we made it happen.
What we have learned is that making the event is a process, that is not only focusing on the event itself, but also on how we are actually making it. It’s a collaborative process. This is why this time I’d like to experiment in treating the preparations to the live event lote4 as an event in the process.
More benefits of emphasising the importance of the process come from the fact that some of us participating in the process of making lote3 could not make it to come to the event, so if we make the process equally important and valuable, their contributions will also be appreciated and with mutual benefit for everyone.
Kicking off from lote3 we can keep improving and building together – just like in an open source project, so that lote can be viewed not only as a one-time event, but also as an open source collaborative project, that continuously offers value to it’s contributors and participants.
While developing lote as a process, we are also building lote4 - a real-live event of community get-together, and talking about what we have learned during the process.
The ingredients of lote event can always be improved and we can always add value to it at any time. This is why we “release early”, and we aim to “release often”. *
So we release lote3.1 with knowing what we want ( as we learned a lot in the making of lote3 ) and also knowing what we want to improve ( what is even more important in the development process ) we still have to collaboratively decide on many other details (for example when and where we want it) but this is a journey that we can pleasantly enjoy together.
This journey starts early, with a lot of time to lote4 (probably few months) as we want to take our time to make everything work well.
At this stage we release lote3.1 alpha (Lote version 3.1 alpha) and we’ll be developing it until we’ll get to the improved version : lote4. Maybe we’ll have major improvements (new versions) on our journey and we’ll always look for constructive feedback from the community about our open source project in the making.
This year’s journey of making lote is accompanied with a great project the #unMonastery and many interesting and meaningful projects as being part of it.
So the process of making lote4 and the #unMonastery as a co-working and co-living space will have the opportunity to learn a lot from each other.
Making lote4 is an open source project and it is also a journey and the path that we have to travel together. Let’s enjoy it 
I’m taking a (co) lead on coordinating this journey and making the lote3.x a beautiful process leading to the
lote4, and beyond.