Everyone and their granny is calling things “Labs” or “Hub” or “Workshop” or “Hackathon”. “Edgeryders Labs”, while technically correct for this format, sounds semantically tired to me.
But @Nadia is right that we need a name to denote an action-oriented, many-to-many offline conversation, that “shakes up” the normal online Edgeryders process and enriches it with new juice, new people, new relationships. So I am trying to look in new directions for metaphors and naming ideas. One, of course, is the direction of the medieval monasteries. For example, the scriptorium is the hall where monks copy manuscripts. The word comes from the Latin word for “writing”. So, scriptorium would be a place for writing together. If we can find a Latin verb that describes what we do at LOTE, we can add the suffix -ium or -eum to denote the space. Another lovely Latin word (not a verb!) is artifex, artisan or maker. Chapter 57 of the Rule is dedicated to the artifices monasterii.
A second direction is evolution. LOTEs are variability engines: they create new variants in our thinking, as we get exposed to interesting people and far-out ideas. Most new variants “die”, but some take hold and change our way of looking at the world forever. Maybe we could call it recompositorium, the place of recombining, but the Latin is a bit stretched. Evolution is itself a Latin word (it comes from the verb evolvere, that means “drag forward by rolling”), but I cannot make it into a place in a convincing way.
Any thoughts?
