After yesterday’s Twitterstorm, I think we have much of what we need down for LOTE4. Of course there is a lot of stuff to organise, and a lot of nudging to get people to write down their sessions for the program, but it’s there. I would like to lay down the final cornerstone: bring some unMonasterians back to Matera to make the venue into a real unMonastery.
The reasoning is this: @Marc and @mariabyck both noticed that when the Brazilians of Brasilicata moved in after the end of the prototype, some of the nice rules and conventions guiding the unMonastery fell apart – for example the tension towards zero waste production, championed by @elf_Pavlik and then adopted by the House. At LOTE4, there is a real danger of the unMonastery building becoming a place to crash – and as such, unrespected, unclean, generic, exploited for hot water and toilets but not stewarded.
Solution: move in 3-4 unMonasterians. They will move as people who know what to do: naturally, newcomers will refer to them and imitate them. @Ben had the idea to advertise this as “unMonastery Lite”: you are not just going to a hackathon (I suggest we prioritise hackathon participants in allocating beds in the unMonastery) and crashing somewhere because it is cheaper, you are joining the only unMonastery on Earth, albeit for a short time. That means – at least in part – living according to Protocol. True, we don’t have Protocol 1.0 yet, but we do have candidate “lines of code”: the 7 am bell, kitchen duty, zero waste… this is enough structure for a week. The names of Masters of the House @Bembo_Davies and @katalin were floated.
I would also really welcome an unMonastery Summit session. It is a great opportunity to catch up on what people are doing. Of course we could improvise it on the fly, but this stuff has drawing power and can help us make this initiative a success. Ben, you are the most credible candidate for initiating this. Edgeryders will be behind it, of course.
What does everyone think?