We are excited to finally announce Living On The Edge #3, our third whole-community scale event. Two important things have happened since LOTE2:
Edgeryders is now a social enterprise! We may be the first case ever of a spinoff from a public sector online project – at least, we are not aware of any other. We have already explained why we are doing this, and how this can benefit the whole community. We still think it is worth doing, and we are moving forward. More on Edgeryders-the-company is forthcoming.
The first project from the Edgeryders community is also moving forward. UnMonastery Matera is officially set to open later in the year or early in 2014.
It just makes sense for us all to get together and work out how to have many more projects like the unMonastery in 2014. We’ll do it in the unMonastery building itself – it is breathtaking, and as egderyders-y as can be. It will happen on October 29th - November 3rd 2013. Trust me – you want to save the date. We will even have an epic Halloween party in the unMonastery!
The unMonastery moved from concept idea to planning and ongoing execution in less than one year. Ben did it, so chances are you can do it too – with a little luck and a lot of help from the rest of the community. LOTE3 is where we all tool up and skill up to do so. We will build the Edgeryders Guide to Making Projects Happen, with documentation on what is working for some of us, what knowledge and skillsets need to be deployed in what situation, what organisational resources are there for the community.
Here’s what you can do to make this happen.
make a commitment to coming – and do it now. Right away. We are not a publicly funded project anymore: we (meaning Edgeryders-the-company and the unMonastery group) think we can fund the conference, but we need something to stand on as we do the fundraising. And this something is a vibrant, radical, skilled, innovative community that wants to get together. We want to tell funders and clients that we are going to do this thing anyway, and that they’d better get on board. For this to happen, we need to know you are coming. So here’s the deal: we will try to raise funding to pay for people to travel to Matera. The first people to be funded will be those who first committed to coming! Worst case scenario, even if we don’t succeed, it will be cheaper than staying at home: it’s just a RyanAir flight to Bari and inexpensive accommodation. See who else is coming.
get involved into fleshing out the program. We’ll build it together: for now, we want you to write us a paragraph about what you would like to do, discuss or learn about in LOTE3.
join our volunteers. Whatever you are passionate about doing, we can use it.
All of these things you can do in one go: just visit your user profile, click “Edit Profile” & fill in the LOTE-relevant info. If you don’t have an Edgeryders account yet, just create one and you’ll be able to do that right on signup. Just do it. We’ll be in touch soon after.
I commit to coming, even if I’ll be really stretched for time. Anyway, I want to contribute to Edgeryders because I believe in it profoundly. I offer now to do some preparatory research on social sculpture for creative community change, if that would contribute to the programme.
Bridget, I read your contribution to LOTE on your profile.
I would like to work with you on tailorworking this to the local territory! I’ve been collaborating with Matera2019 for quite a while now (the city is bidding to European Capital of Culture) and would love to go on creating links between the design of the path to the ECOC title (main themes and cultural assets the city has decided to represent) and other pragmatic approaches to community resilience throuch creativity
I don’t know how you feel with Italian, but there is a blogpost on the themes of Matera2019 and some comments from 2 members of the scientific committee (Franco Bianchini, expert in cultural planning who has a very bottom-up approach to planning, and Giovanni Padula).
Ilaria: I encouraged Bridget to apply as cultural curator for MT2019. In the end she did not, because she did not feel she meets the call’s requirements in terms of knowledge of Italian. But maybe we can find, together, some way that she can be involved. I strongly approve of your taking up an interface role.
Thanks, Alberto. This is encouraging: managing encounters is a delicate but truly gratifying experience. It seems like the deep understanding of the local materan community can find useful outputs in linking communities and catalyzing projects beyond the regional borders: and this has been my mission in the past years (luckily, not only mine!). This weekend I will be working on a paper which links the MT2019 themes to the stuff that is emerging from the community: I can then summarize and translate it and we can see where this can meet LOTE3. I also wanted to get to know Bridget’s work better as it seems to me it can be intertwined with many aspects which have come up! So yes, let’s! But first, let me collect the knowledge
Yesterday I met person organizing http://elevate.at and most likely will join that event, it happens in Graz October 23-27th. I can hitchhike right after it to Matera ~1300km hopefull within 2 days
I would like to participate in co-ordinating food, transportation (rideshares etc.) and accomodations…
Hey Elf, happy we have you on board. Would love to join you guys in BCN but cannot make it this time. If you have a little time to help after the summit, there are a few tech tasks that would make it much easier for us all to coordinate around LOTE3 and helps us all stay away from e.g FB which excludes the freesofties. The most important and urgent are the Calendar and shared tasklist functionalities as they will enable us to collaboratively build the program and make the information easily available and always up to date without need to produce multiple google docs etc. Do you think you could help with this, or know someone with Drupal chops who could?
Hey Nadia, in the end I didn’t go to Barcelona and at this moment I want to take little time to set my trajectory for next few weeks/months. On technical note, I like self hosted tools but wouldn’t recommend to do everything with drupal… I’ll try to have more information on various options of combining independent pieces of software into smooth online experience before LOTE3 Not sure how you currently manage small tasks/issues but this website gives me a hassle to use on non widescreen display…
Not sure how you currently manage small tasks/issues but this website gives me a hassle to use on non widescreen display…
Maybe you mean just screen resolution? Indeed, on desktops, the site works indeed best at 1200+ px screen width. But also should work on smaller widths without too much problems. What would you like to change? You can just post any bug report or feature request as a “post” to the Edgeryders Dev & Testing group.
Elf, it’s great that you put yourself forward as trasportation/accomodation coordinator. The narrative we would like to spin around this conference is perfect for you: the unPilgrimage. This is where we all go see how the unMonastery is taking shape, show the unMonastery group some support and try to learn what we can from that experience and others we may share, so that we can all start more projects like it (in my circles this is known as capacity building).
It makes perfect sense that people would journey to Matera through hitchhiking, ridesharing etc: even the journey becomes part of the upskilling and capacity building, where the skill being developed is that of working together, pooling resources, coordinating, collaborating with each other. Also, I would say, learning to trust each other. In this sense, you are the perfect coordinator! You are not only a person that knows how to do that, but an avatar of extreme collaboration yourself, the archetypical unpilgrim. Talk of leading by example!
Very happy to have you all here at home! After speaking so much about Matera you will be able to come here and also live with the local community! You will love it! I can help in finding places where to sleep > couchsurfing and friends!
Even though the upcoming months are filled with uncertainty for me, I am coming to Matera! I would love to help with what I can. I will have more time to dedicate to this starting with July.
Uh-oh, my goal for the summer is to talk to as many people as possible in Moldova about just doing something together and get the local context right. Nothing clear yet. Ideas include - starting a Community Supported Agriculture pilot project, re-imagining abandoned buildings in the historical center of Chisinau (capital city), looking for a location and local support networks for setting up an unMonastery, looking for possible funders for a FabLab. I will also try to aplly for a position in a community-led local development project (the first one I have heard of in Moldova).
Elf, the Elevate Festival sounds great! Perhaps we could hitchhike togehter from there?
Working behind the scenes to set up a micro site within the platform for LOTE3 to make it easier to navigate and get involved. If anyone wants to help, ping me nadia at edgeryders dot eu
If Matera calls, I am certainly on… and ifit’s mixed with Edgeryders, well: what better cocktail would you want? I will very probably shift my center of gravity more down south (than Brussels), so I will be hopping between Rome and Matera more often. Practically, this means that I can lend a hand in all that is interaction with local community for logistics and organizatio, brainstorm on how you want to mingle with the city (despite the language barrier :-), give my contribution to the development of themes and networks that are linked to the issues Basilicata (and more generally the South) is facing.
For example, a couple of weeks after the LOTE3 (on the 21-22-23 of November) Pietro Laureano (the expert in traditional knowledge for ecosystem management, who brought the Sassi of Matera on the UNESCO WOrld Heritage List) is organizing the world UNESCO conference in Matera, 20 years after the inscription of the Sassi on the UNESCO list, for a “the international protection of landscapes 2.0”. Without overlapping, maybe we could find to build bridges?
Thanks so much Ilaria, you and Andrea are both key facilitators and could help anchor lote in the local context, so that Edgeryders will be warmly received… How about we start working on a post & call for participation for the Community Matera 2019 that would go on your platform? Maybe a partial translation in Italian of this post with an invitation to support the event? What do you think?
Also, as our microwebsite will be ready soon, do you think we could list the community as a support network for the event?.. alongside Casa Netural?
Writing a post on the community is definetly the first step. And it can also be the occasion to ask if thay want to be partners (I would say yes, but it’s my personal opinion). However, there is something deeper to be triggered, and it’s about aknowledging that LOTE3 can be the momentum to explicit some of the implicit resources of the local community: peer-to-peer, for example. Which in local language would be called “hospitality”. But there is more to that. I’ll give it a though as this question is really bouncing again and again in my mind and being enriched by the numerous imputs that come from encounters such as unMonastery-Matera, and now LOTE-Matera. But again, there is Matera and Matera.
