LOTE is a big, complicated event involving people from many countries, logistical difficulties, multi-language communication, chronic underresourcing and just about any other complication you can think of. There is no way we can all just sit together in community calls and troubleshoot problems one at a time. We need structure. Here’s a proposal for how we might go about it.
Guiding principles
while coherent, decentralize. Many edgeryders have a thing for decentralization, because it works so damn well. The proposal goes for as much decentralization as we can get away with, while still keeping LOTE reasonably coherent. In keeping with the community's tradition, decentralizing is not assigning tasks and exerting supervision: the mantra is the old "who does the work calls the shots". In decentralizing, we forego veto power on each other. We organize to enable, not to control.
packetize and diversify tasks. Packetization opens the door for people to donate very small chunks of their time to organizing LOTE and still being useful; diversification takes advantage of the full range of talents, skills and passion within the community.
sarchastic old men don't lead unless there's absolutely no one else that will do it. Another Edgeryders tradition: older (wiser?) edgeryders like Vinay, Lucas, myself, Chris etc. agree to put in legwork but let the 20somethings and 30somethings take the lead.
Building blocks
I propose an architecture made of three kinds of building blocks: sessions, tracks and services.
A session is an atom of activity within LOTE. Generally, it requires a room; materials (post-its, maybe some more specific stuff); someone to lead it (it could be a speaker or a facilitator); participants; and documentation arrangements. Examples of sessions have been siggested already: co-design the interiors of the unMonastery (by Andrea); how to take care of each other preventing burnout (by Auli); how to win the next European Social Innovation Competition (by Matthias – well, actually I hope Matthias will propose this).
A track is a collection of sessions united by an epic goal. These goals are the reasons that bring us together. Read on for a proposal on tracks and goals.
A service is a LOTE-wide activity that meets some specific necessity shared by all sessions and tracks. Examples of services are: venue(s), free accommodation with local families, food, logistics, the Halloween party, social media/communication, fundraising...
So, how do we organize this?
Applying the principles of decentralization and packetization, I propose to refocus the energy of the community call – the only structure LOTE has right now – in recruiting volunteer coordinators to take the lead on each track and each service. Coordinators would then be responsible for making “their” services or track happen. In some cases, they will in turn need to recruit more people (for example, track leaders still need to fill their tracks with sessions); the community call is to help them with that as best it can.
This is a classic decentralization move. It makes it less likely that things fall through the cracks: if nobody wants to nurse a track, or work on providing a service, the track or service are simply dropped. They are not happening, and we move on to providing the tracks and services that people do want enough to put in the work.
Proposed tracks
If we can quickly arrive to a list of tracks, each with a track leader, we have a high-level description of the program. This means we can explain to people what we are actually going to do at LOTE; but at the same time we leave the door open for people to propose sessions. The track level is general enough for almost anything to fit in; and yet, specific enough to trigger enthusiasm, engagement and registrations. I propose three tracks. There’s nothing magic in the number three, though I think the unMonastery has three main rooms.
Skilling up and tooling up for greater impact. Its epic goal is: allow each participant to roll out the project as visionary, compelling and concrete as the unMonastery by the end of 2014. Sessions that would fit well in here: using Egderyders LBG as a corporate infrastructure for your project; how to best collaborate with each other online; how to sell radical projects to corporate/government folks; how to share failure and take care of each other to preserve precious brainpower from burnout.
Building the unMonastery. Its epic goal: designing together an institution to last 200 years. Sessions that would fit well in here: designing the interiors of the unMonastery; designing the clothing for the unMonasterians; working out protocols of engagement with the local community in Matera and elsewhere.
Unconference On The Edge. Its epic goal: catching up with the cutting edge stuff people within and outside the community are doing.
How to move forwards
If we more or less agree on this, the next step is to recruit, quite aggressively, for track/service coordinators. At this point, the community call becomes a place where we get each other up to speed and troubleshoot the kinks, but the real work is pushed out to the coordinators as soon as we find them.
It does make sense, wondering about organisational process.
To the guiding principles I would also add “Ensure a transparent process” so that there is a way one could follow progress in building Lote and what is happening in each of the tracks. This makes concerted communication possible and also eases the services work: knowing which participants have joined which track and the logistic, financial needs in specific sessions.
Should we make the fleshing out of this high level program the topic of Friday’s community call? I’m thinking:
introduce of each of the 3 tracks and the existing sessions we have so far for each
outline example of process for track leaders, including: what support can they receive from Edgeryders operational team (me, you, Nadia), for example how they can use the Lote workspace; how they can reach out to Lote participants; use ER social media team; also talk a bit about how to packetize and diversify tasks, in practice? (I’m not sure how that is different from how we do it now?)
laying out names for coordinators, through self-selection or peer nominations of people not in the call, so we can go about inviting them afterwards.
Also, I wonder if this new organisational architecture requires further tweaking of the Lote3 workspace?
But before answering these let’s see who else agrees to the big proposal? [Auli], [Ben], [Dorotea], others?
hi alberto, sounds like a good idea overall, but lets not overemphasize so-called tracks and services over sessions, or even just personal introductions and stories just to start…there needs to be encouragement and support for people just to enter in the front door (maybe look around a bit), warm up to this larger organizational potential and just feel inspired to even share one small thing to start…
Hello [mishek] (nice to meet you, by the way!). I agree – and my heart is with the sessions too. Just, I’d like to get someone to actively hunt for great sessions, which is hard in a conference that so far has a zero budget and can only offer in-kind stuff. The more people care about this, the better the outcome: and getting someone to take responsibility for a track is, it seems to me, a step in the right direction.
Yes agree with your intent but where do ideas for tracks come from? Many places of course. But a good start would be at the level of ideas for sessions… this to me means encouraging personal, creative, open conversation on any and every subject to get people thinking and inspired and then going further by helping them develop these ideas and intuitions into possible sessions… this of course requires some sort of organised, solid curation since at the moment we’re dealing with us all out here on the big wide Internet… Yes it may seem that I’m waving my hand around a possible track proposal, but just to be clear, I cannot ‘lead’ this by myself.
Agree, agree, agree. This is a really great piece of work just in terms of laying out a formula for decentralised project management and should be folded into the guide/recipe book.
Since I’m nominated by default for the unMonastery Co-design - I’d like to say now that I wish to expand out the parameters, in order to make the conversation relevant to a larger audience, and potential participants. As previously stated, I’d like to focus on the motivating factors behind unMonastery, co-living and designing new infrastructure. With individuals sessions focused on unMonastery co-design.
I’ll begin structuring and recruiting for the track this weekend.
In addition and related to the above post - there needs to be a landing space, for understanding what’s happening in LOTE, that only requires a single look, I suggest popplet, it’s easy to use, sharable and can give you an instant overview on any project. I’ll create one for unMonastery soon to demonstrate the point.
Quick question around tasks on the EdgeRyders platform, are they clustered? For example could I link to a page of tasks exclusively focused on web development?
“Quick question around tasks on the EdgeRyders platform, are they clustered? For example could I link to a page of tasks exclusively focused on web development?”
Tasks can be filtered / clustered by Project (= group), type, priority and status. The applicable values for that ware on the task manager page. For building the link you need some Firebug magic to find out the URL parameter names, as in the task manager itself they stay invisible (meaning, it uses POST parameters). For example, when I wanted to list all tasks in the Making Lote 3 group that are of type “General Task”, I could use this link: /casetracker?pid=568&case_type_id[]=11. If that kind of clustering is sufficient for you, fine (we can adapt the “task types”, but it should be generic, because it applies to the whole site).
If you want freeform clustering by any tag you choose, the way to go would be filling the “Topics” field in the task edit form. Problem is, I don’t think that linking to a page filtered by tag and node type (like “only tasks”) is possible yet, and somebody would have to look into this for getting it done. If you want that feature, just open a task in the Edgeryders Dev & Testing group.
Nadia is uploading it onto the minisite for lote (http://lote.edgeryders.eu) as I write. We could beautify it (avatars instead of names) and add socially relevant information (who else is on each team?), but I guess a table is an intuitive way to find your own spot while still perceiving the event as a whole.
[Ben], i created an automated Drupal View out of [Alberto]'s post table: basically an overview of LOTE tracks and teams. Plan is to also give people opportunity to “sign up” for those teams in their profiles (read more in the task description). Plus we can add any kind of related (tagged, etc) information into that automated table.
Drupal Views might also be an answer to sorting by task and tag, [Matthias]? We can create almost any kind of clusters/filters with Views.
I realized that now, tracks being implemented as usual Commons Wikis, the fields for LOTE3 “activity clusters” are always visible in wikis. Ok for the prototyping phase, but finally we should have them removed again, and instead have a content type “tracks” that has them. Can be copied over by deriving a module from commons_wikis and installing it. Have done a similar thing with Commons Tasks already.
a) simply make a copy of wiki content type and convert existing tracks there, or
b) keep the cluster field in content types (it’s also in Posts and Tasks, btw) up to LOTE and remove it later (it won’t be necessary anyway…?)
Though the last option would pose some problems regarding the display of those track associations… Ugh. Guess we should come up with a LOTE organizational kit of content types and alike that could be re-used for the next LOTEs (and possibly organising whatever kind of event). Smells like a module or something…
Smells like a module or something…