LOTE4: The Stewardship from Edgeryders on Vimeo.
Many many thanks to @sammuirhead for making this beautiful video of, well, us 
To honor the care and attention that went into our coming together this year, we’re putting together an overview of shared initiatives shaping up. Whether you were at Lote4 or not, the doors are wide open. The ethos is if you are interested in something, want to see something improved, or feel something is missing… get involved. In Edgeryders nothing happens till you say “I would like to do x”
1. A key aim of Edgeryders is to facilitate and encourage mutual support between community members and collaboration on projects.
So over the next year we are going to focus energy on:
A. Harmonious Hackathons: after prototyping this at Lote4, a bunch of Edgeryders really want to making them happen on a regular basis and making them economically sustainable (ensure people organising them are paid). We would do a number of themes, one of which could be #HackCare continuing on foundation set at lote4 by @remy, @ben and everyone who participated. Interested?
B. Building an Edgeryders home base. We also agreed that we need “our own” space to run events regularly, as hackathons need weeks rather than days to “complete” work. This will make it easier to keep money and time costs at an acceptable level. Email nadia@edgeryders.eu if you want to get involved in this.
C. Edgeryders.eu/ Makerfox integration: the experiment with using barter to build lote4 using makerfox produced promising results. In order for us to use it for more activities, the integration with Edgeryders needs to be smoother, so we need to specify what needs to be done and find resources to cover the cost of the work. Ping @matthias in the Makerfox project if you want to help…
D. Building stronger community ties: it has to to with growing thicker social ties with each other, with organisations with resources and need for our skills/projects. We will do this online with regular content like Get Back in the Box! and the Making Space series curated by @anon. If you enjoy writing for the web, please do step forward- we’re trying to build an editorial team, both interesting and economically sustainable. For when we meet physically, it would be super if we take the time to document on the platform so as not to fragment the community or exclude others from the conversations. Got other ideas?
2. The unMonastery prototype was successful and we want to continue developing the existing site and set up new ones.
The unMonastery was again a highlight of Lote4, with a lot of reflections. It was agreed that the time is not mature for setting up a separate unMonastery organisation and that Edgeryders LBG should continue as “home organisation” for the unMonastery project.
A. Continued presence in Matera: We agreed to produce a credible plan for running the unMonastery space including revenue streams/fundraising activities in order to present to the Comitato Matera 2019 before they are dissolved (i.e. end of the working year). For those interested, @mariabyck, @katalin, @nicobis and @ritao are exploring this.
B. New possible unMonastery sites: Edgeryders LBG (the company) has been approached with two requests for new development projects which could involve setting up new unMonastery sites. After a session with community members during Lote4 one proposal was sent off to Fabrizio Barca.
3. We would like to experiment with different formats for community events
Lote4 was generative at many levels (documentation is available), yet it is an annual sprint of 3 months with over 50 community members collaborating on it and there’s some risk of burnout in the core team. The question is can we look for lighter event formats and teams to drive them? Proposals ranged from piggybacking existing events and making ourselves visible as “Edgeryders”; to making them more harmonious hackathon focused; to doing a walking format (a long trek and people host conversations while walking or during breaks). The key thing being that whatever the format it has to not exclude people with disabilities if they want to join, and honour the commitment to great documentation.
We’ve already started testing this at
#31C3 (@danohu, @msanti, @dorotea, @cjd @igel are coordinating here)
and
Transmediale (@kei @lauren @katalin @elf_pavlik @ben @james @bembo_davies driving this)
We’re probably missing a lot of important things, there is a lot going on… After our conversations we realized there is a huge information asymmetry between those of us who have been involved in Edgeryders for the longest and more recent arrivals. Step one to honoring our pledge to bridge that divide so we have more of a level playing field is now online, and you are most welcome to join the conversation.
Thoughts? Ideas? Anything you want to help build? See you in the different project conversations!
Nadia, Noemi, and everyone !