LOTE3 Volunteers

https://player.vimeo.com/video/44323655

Remember the mindblowingly awesome experience 200 of us had in Strasbourg last June? And then the #LOTE2 meetup in December?

Isn’t it time we stated the crazy, fun work of putting together the next edgestock? Come help!

To make it happen we need a dedicated core team of volunteers. Obviously, no one works alone and we support one another, but we need to split up areas of responsibility so everything is covered. 

UPDATE June 16th:

Location?

Who wants to host the next lote, preferably in the summer? Does anybody have a space or knows a good/free/cheap space where we could do it? I’m a member at ClujHub, a co-work space in centre Cluj with capacity of 100, cosy but much much smaller than the Egg in Brussels: basically a 2 storey house. Could try to get it for free, but cant promise anything… They’re just getting started and need to recover all the investment. 

Location? Locations?

lote over summer sounds like a good idea :slight_smile: Are we looking for a single place where to held the meeting and sleep over? Second thing, would you base the meeting in a big city which may have the advantage of be easy to reach or it would be better this time to find a cosy place in the countryside where the ‘community’ feeling can be even enhanced? I guess we have to take into account transportation costs once deciding upon the location as having a lot of participants is crucial.

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nothing pre-established

David, hey welcome back! :) I think whichever way is fine, if we can find one big place to accommodate us and provide logistical support for the meeting that would be great. if not, it’s great too, we saw it in Stras and Brussels. I think the more urban the environment, the slimmer the chances to get 1 big multifunctional space. 

The thing with transportation costs is that for example in certain parts of Eastern Europe it would be harder to find cheap travel by airplane. Then again, Brussels was not too cheap either. Catering and accommodation expenses as you travel East are smaller… There was another mention of the FreeLab, not sure if Petros still thinks we can do it there… ? If not, reading Eimhin and the others on facebook, I think we have a big up for Berlin!!!

Locatification

There are a lot of folk close to, or in Berlin, plus a few venues there that are available through members. What do people reckon of that? On Zossener Strase there is Just Juggling who have a nice big space on the ground floor, the shop would lend us their coffee machine, and there is a dance studio down stairs for breakout sessions plus an outdoor space on the roof. One thing, I have to be in SF for SoCap again in September (:stoked to have been invited back:) End of August would be brilliant, alas if I can’t make it, so be it, I’m happy to help anyway.

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Locatification > Berlin

Well, I think that Berlin might be a very good option. Besides being fairly easy to reach even with Bla Bla car and the like it is indeed a promising place where to build up a co-design experiment. I’m confident lote can benefit from the atmosphere of creativity and innovation that have characterized the city of Berlin over recent years. Possibly, given that it is a fertile area for ‘experiments’ it may be relatively easier to find sponsors than elsewhere, in case we decide we need external funding.

Eventually it’s Matera

Hi David, it’s been a while :slight_smile: long enough to allow us to plan the thing and properly announce it. So it turns out that the unMonastery that’s being prototyped in Matera offers great context and free location for the next event. So we’re doing it there, end of October, can you make it?? Also, you can register now by updating your user profile & telling the community what your availability is… Here’s the whole announcement :https://edgeryders.eu/blog/lote3-save-the-date

Simultaneous

Thinking about what David was saying about countryside v city and the issue of transportation costs about whether to have “break outs” in towns/cities where people want to organise mini #LOTEs, obviously connected to the main lote. This could help those who want to invest their time in lote but can’t afford to come to still take part?

P.S. Happy to help in logistics wherever the lote is :wink:

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Your experience with TransEuropa fest?

I know you guys have been doing this for a while: a big European festival with events in many cities… and in each city multiple locations and people in charge. this seems like a huge effort, how did you manage? I know the EuroAlter group in Cluj was taking full ownership of the events here, and setting up their own group of volunteers . But it sounds like you need a lot of resources.

We do have plenty engaged members in various parts of Europe, so if anybody wants to coordinate this i suggest they go ahead and do it and we can help with outreach, and share all the materials and content we develop. What we do not have is money to support those events as well… at least not in the initial phase. 

What do the others think?

How do we manage? Good question! It’s only a “big” European festival if you aggregate the number of activities across the cities. We had 250 activities across 12 cities last year, but many of them are micro activities, while some are programmes that we celebrate during the festival. We start, then we try and join up the dots between the ideas that each city has come up with - in terms of types of activity (like living libraries) or issues they have in common. From all these ideas, we come up with design principles and capture the essence of all the ideas keywords that represent their diversity & messiness. We then bring these into the process of developing ideas in our cities so that they’re infused of the discussions going on in other cities taking part. It also helps link people from different cities who’re working on similar “keywords” together to develop connections between their activities or even organise / fundraise for joint projects - and that’s really important, to make the collaboration / transnationality meaningful both to people helping organise, taking part and fund/resource! Here’s a summary of the methods we’ve used.Here’s an example of where several cities have used the design principle around how people can use all their senses to express they way they feel about public space. In this example, the resources were artists / designers within our network and lots of paper & string…When we do organise activities that do cost significant resource, like our caravan of the commons, the festival is only one stop on that project’s journey (literally in this case), so you’re not putting all your eggs in one event’s basket.

For Edgeryders, you have lote which seems to be a well understood & practiced concept across the community. People could then organise within or alongside lote mini pop-up activities, some which could be really thought through and others which are just playful and really lightweight (we had someone rockup at our festival co-design meetup and she came up with this idea of plastering stickers that looked like smiles across the market, the fact that no-one found all the smiles is less important than the fun she had creating the activity!)

Edgeryders Guide to the Edge

Nadia just posted in the Facebook group the proposal to use the LOTE3 for creating content for our very own P2P Edgeryders Guide handbook. I completely agree that this is the most helpful cotent to produce and get out there for our fellows in Europe and beyond.

But, in what format to do this? The book we created for the policy makers was all nice, but also a TON of effort. And it would be even more effort to keep it updated. So why not use a Stackoverflow clone on edgeryders.eu, with some adaptations to make it work for questions with no one best answer.

Advantages: proven gamification concept; simple, short engagement; more social and fun than writing a book; it keeps itself updated with newest answers when circumstances and policies change; possibilities to engage way more people than we could host in collaboratively writing a book; plus, books are so nineties (naughties at best) – new formats for knowledge presentation are developing, and we can play around with them and see how we like them.

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Yes, with the theory and practice living and developing together

I don’t know if you’ve read Christopher’s great post about work and innovation. During a workshop we had in Stockholm recently, Christopher brought up the need for us to produce a work like Stephane Hessels Indignez Vous…a theoretical framework that does not reinforce the paradigm we are all working within. And I think a really useful guide is like the best cookbooks that while presenting a hands on instructible, also weave in contexutal information, inspiration, anecdotes and suggestions for those who would like to explore this further. The best example I have come across so far is “The Allotment Book” a practical guide to creating a plot (you know for growing your own food) by Kim Wilde. It starts with the history of allotments and the political dimensions, and then moves seamlessly between instructions, and political discourse. I had no idea something like plots of land could be so interesting and it made me want to get one started!

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Value of reusable content

I gotta disagree respectfully. :slight_smile:

First, good theory is just a generalization of good practice. Without practice, no theorizing about it.

Then, I can see the aesthetic, artistic and practical value of the book you propose. Yes, it would gather its following, and there would be people who read a “narrative instruction manual” end to end. But how many? It’s not everybody’s style, esp. on the Net where content gets ever shorter and more focused. (And that’s not necessarily bad. It’s different: the web as an answer machine makes this kind of content meaningful. People would be embarrassed to know how little I know about Drupal and how much I look up just-in-time in stackoverlow.com’s 4 million pre-solved problems :D.) Although creating a book is an achievement to be proud of, if we can have more impact with another format, why would we go for a book format, that potentially only a few people really consume? (“Nobody tells us to produce long (policy) documents any more, so why should we?”).

Also, the theory in such a book is not everybody’s view of things. By adding a theory layer, you add potential for disagreement, while on the level of details there will be a lot of agreement. For example, I’d potenially agree with Christopher on practical questions of squatting. But not on the meta level, where he proposes to develop a framework for leveraging the state, and I propose one (EarthOS) for replacing the state with decentralized solutions.

Of course I see a place for political theory and a framework – it’ spart of becoming true citizen experts. Just that, as in economics, there will always be different schools of thought in politics and sociology, and I propose to acknowledge that Edgeryders will always contain experts of many such schools of thought.

Here’s where I see the value of reuse coming in: If the chunks of detail content we produce are open content and prepared to be reused, we can just do so. You might write a narrative-style cookbook for social change on big and small levels. I might be happy with hands-on topical collections of Q&A type instructions, or maybe summarize them into a hands-on booklet like Tech Tools for Activism.

I acknowledge however that nodbody can be sure to have the best theory and best approach for impact. We’re all trying. But trying multiple approaches in parallel is a strength even, as can be seen in the free software movement. So I propose we all (as potential content producers for this kinda project) should find a way to produce reusable chunks of content, and then reuse them as we see fit. A Stackoverflow type of site would be a suggestion. And I can well imagine institutional and governmental actors to be there as well, for example answering questions about social innovation as I propose here or about EU funding (thinking of our very valuable discussion session with Prabhat Agarwal in the EU parliament). Collaboratively authoring a complete book produces however hardly reusable content, as book content with interwoven theory is not modular enough for that.

(Side note: from all the 101 StackExchange sites, there is only sustainability.stackexchange.com with an at least somwhat similar focus to what I propose. But maybe somebody found something closer elsewhere?)

I agree, Im thinking about context here…

How viable an approach, solution or idea is will depend a lot on the context. Aggregating and making sense of that data gives us all an additional dimension, in that we can learn more about how to affect change and what demands need to be put forward when interacting with stakeholders. Whether it is local administrations, investors, media, whatever.

What  I mean by theory is thinking tools that enable us and others to develop values and norms that are also part of the work of developing alternatives. Certainly values and norms play a role in why we consider certain approaches realistic and viable, and not others… I was thinking of a session on Spirituality and Resilince during Edgecamp that Luke Devlin lead. I think what goes on in your mind, and how to work on that is a big deal of being ok. The same goes with the body. Another examle is some work Susa and I did a while back. We started with ideas about the physical well being and somehow though a long list of things we would need to learn more about to be able to do the kind of bodywork we were exploring we ended up at collaboration. With a much stronger initiative than the original one.

I think this matters because if you have a solid, and deep understanding of what you do and how it relates to what others do, it is easier to make a case and also find ways of working together.

Another aspect is “how does this map onto policy/politics”  or how is it affected by policy or politics.  And how to go about making sense of this together.

What is P2P, what is the goal of the guide and for who?

I definitely would like a guide to curate all the P2P initiatives and projects nowadays. Before discussing about the format of this guide I think it’s important to first decide or define what P2P is and what projects/initiatives/websites/platforms belongs to it?

Secondly I think it is important that we look at he potential audience for this guide. Is it for people already known in the business or for attracting new people to get engaged in the new movement with P2P technology, or maybe both? I prefer to have a low profile guide for people who haven’t heard about the new movement yet, to persuade more people to get involved in P2P projects.

My third point is that also other people would like to have a guide/dictionary about P2P. I have seen a proposal on the OuiShare Global Facebook group about making a Wikisprint about P2P initiatives. Already libraries exist at Mesh, Collaborative Consumption, Plopp.us, and probably more… . According to me they are all good especially Plopp.us (but what is this name about? :)), but certainly not perfect and i think most will not convince potential users. For example, the categories are totally different on each library and the libraries are very big too and mostly world orienteded. Personally note: Funny thing that the collaborative economy don’t collaborate much with each other to synchronize, maybe there should be an Edgeryders project about the collaboration within the collaborative economy :P?

For my the best P2P guide will be locally (per country, per city) based, just a short description, link and let you know the alternative platform which do about the same. Maybe we can add some recommendations or reviews. Curious what other people think about this…?

Regards, Marius

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Making a living?

Marius,

In my understanding the guide would be less a repository and dictionary of initiatives, rather practical information, insights and instructibles that are clear, easily legible, and can inspire others, support those who are re-negotiating their relationship with the value of work. Making a living has been a crucial point of conversation between Edgeryders for the past year.The context is the dated paradigm asserting jobs for life, ascending careers, enough jobs for everyone, smooth transition from university into a labour market, so we’d try to provide better answers to questions like how we go about:

  1. paying the rent

  2. influencing who you are in the eyes of others

  3. finding reasons to get out of bed  (reference in this post and comments)

I think the audience is as large as it gets: say, even proeficient users of p2p technology would still have something to learn from a re-ruralizing experience of a different kind of peer support; someone who is indeed trapped in a meaningless job might find the courage to adopt other solutions, as radical as they may appear.

Referring to your 3rd point, cross polinating ideas with others working on this is crucial, and I think it is not a coincidence that Edgeryders members are also Oui Share or Shareable enthusiasts, and viceversa… the idea is to build on initiatives out there, and of course not be redundant.

Response

Hi,

Sorry for my late reaction. I am not getting updates when a new comment is made.

Ok now i understand the project a bit more, sorry i misunderstand it :). Really trying to understand what EdgeRyders is about. And i am a slow starter.Just recently i discovered where #LOTE stands for…haha.

Still i don’t fully understand what kind of guide you want to make than. What has p2p to do with the questions you sum up? Can you specify? I am a bit confused.

Do you maybe have to link of the result of the last LOTE? Thanks in advance.

As user of p2p platforms, like airbnb, gidsy, konnektid, shareyourmeal, uniiverse, fray.it, toogethr, bedycase, wimdu, localguiding, shiroube, cookening, beyondcroissant and some more, i am quiet interested in making any guide or share my experiences about it.

marius

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I think the connection is in the framing of the narrative: a guide for us to help one another and learn how to make a living with meaning, hence the peer to peer.

Experience sharing maybe?

Marius, welcome and thanks for meaningful input :slight_smile:

“maybe there should be an Edgeryders project about the collaboration within the collaborative economy :P?

I like the idea! (Given the fact that I’m building yet another directory of P2P and open source alternatives, and judging from its unfinished state, I’m very aware of the problem of keeping it all up to date, and relevant per-location.) But it’s a major effort. It’s about defining data exchange standards, programming plugins for several CMS and document authoring systems, and of course getting all the collaborative economy directories on board first. Settling for one shared directory with open governance (in analogy to WIkipedia) would be far simpler in terms of effort, but is probably also more unrealistic … . Not sure what we could do …

The other thing is, given the fact that there are so many P2P project directories out there already, we probably should in our guide move beyond this and collect the experience of using P2P resources. In my experience, knowing which tools are out there is still a far cry from making them work out in my personal life …

YES.

this is exactly the point. It is shared experiences that is at the core of what we do. Because that is valuable contextual information as well as a contact point to someone who has valuable tacit knowledge that is difficult to communicate.