Ticking Boxes and Ideas.
Okay. As has been characteristic of the unMonastery project since our arrival, time is never on our side - however it does look like given the funds we’ve saved so far, the extension until at least the end of July is looking real. Confirmation will come this week.
Thank you Maria for taking the lead on this and all the work so far, over the next few days I’ll be feeding a lot into the process.
So there’s a couple of questions I think only @Alberto can answer; Given that we’re working with Italian public money, what are the roadblocks that prevent us from funding new unMonasterians in the building? Are we bound to doing another call for participants, or can we just pick people in Matera or further afield that we think are right for the project? What boxes should we be aiming to tick?
Some thoughts and rules I would recommend:
- The absolute minimum stay for a funded position (per-diem) should be 2 weeks.
- Funding travel should only be applicable to those who can commit at least 2 months.
- Anyone wishing to join the project should pledge to a certain set of conditions (integrate into cooking/cleaning contributions, active public reporting/sharing of their time here on EdgeRyders and elsewhere, core focus on ensuring the continuity of the overall unMonastery project in Matera etc)
- Those joining at this point should either have a solid project that is already underway, well resourced and matches up well with both the challenges and context of Matera OR be able to join or support an existing project (see the post about OTS as an example of this)
- Commit to agreed 'Recipes' see below.
So, Recipes.
I think we should devise patterns for durations of stay so that we can set out very clear expectations of those coming to stay at the unMonastery, this could be composed of something like this.
1 Week Stay:
- Cook 4-6 Meals
- Teach 1 Workshop
- 1 Public Post
- 2 Contributions to an existing project
Other ideas regarding occupancy.
- Coupling with Joseph Grima's cultural program; it's inevitable that this program will involve residencies, at the present moment I struggle to see how MT2019 can competently create the infrastructure required to run an international residency program. It makes sense that the unMonastery should accommodate this kind of collaboration - it makes double sense given that Grima's track record of shows suggests a strong overlap of values. Adhocracy being a fine example of the sort of work unMonastery is designed to host. Also it should be noted that what we've budgeted for is an extra two months with 6 unMonasterians, which leaves at least 2 beds available.
- Erasmus Entrepreneur program, this is something that @andrea.paoletti has been working with for CasaNetural, it's certainly something we should consider, @Noemi am I right to think that you have a good understanding for how this works?
- I've been thinking a lot recently as unMonastery as the possible soft infrastructure for large global software projects, particularly in respect to speculative plans for a rural iteration of unMonastery - and how this might support the development of the Open Source Ecology project. I'll be putting a post out when I have time next week.
But I think it could be very beneficial to reach out to projects like this and offer a residency place for a programmer that wants to give a significant chunk of time contributing to a code based project with unMonastery as their base - on the proviso that they commit to X number of workshops as part of Open Tech School. Think of it as the unScripture element of the unMonastery. Perhaps Mozilla or others would be interested in such a proposition, what do you think @elf Pavlik?
Lastly, there are still many question marks sitting over the future of our time here, the impression I have from MT2019 is that can’t easily grant more funds to the project after July, politically at least - so this makes it very difficult to plan going forward - @Alberto are you in any position at the moment to give clarity as to how EdgeRyders contractually will be involved in Matera this year beyond unMonastery and how this will feed into or support the continuation of unMonastery?