Fondazione di Comunità Messina is hosting a physical event on 21-22 September:
Annual gathering of the European network of community foundations
Annual gathering of the Italian network of community foundations
It becomes a natural platform for pitching clients what we (as in: FDCM + Edgeryders) want to do. So, they reached out and asked, do we want to be on the program, and what with?
Ideally, two things:
“Dog and pony” SF-Econ event, like in Istanbul and Brussels. For the role of the economist, Fabrizio Barca is a natural, with people like Paola Casavola or Aline Pennisi as plan B, myself as plan C.
Collaborative Econ-SF writing + SSNA of the result, borrowing from the BBU project. FDCM, maybe you remember, has offered to fund a writers residency or two in Messina. The writer(s) in residence would also participate in the dog and pony.
We could then invite people we want to pitch to Messina.
Follow-up comes fairly naturally, because FDCM’s own annual event is being reworked into a series of events, tentatively to take place between October 2020 and spring 2021. Among the invitees, Amartya Sen (). Also, remember we have a scheduled event for European Regions’ week in Brussels on October 14th.
Problems are, as usual, time and money.
Time. The dog-and-pony poses relatively few problems. But the collaborative fiction is another story. I would imagine using the residencies to start fleshing out a world, and then inviting people to join in. This would mean a minimum of 2-3 months to contribute to the fiction, plus the coding.
Money. We have some small money lying around in the SF-ECO project, for example we can fly people to Messina. Messina takes care of the author(s) via residency. But the coding etc… that’s another story. We have C-KIC partners who have expressed interests, but not sure whether they will come through.
So, what I need here is:
For people to save the date if they are interested. If we manage to do the collaborative fiction in some form, it would be important to have at least one member of the BBU team. And of course Nadia, myself, probably Andreja.
An idea of the money/calendar implications of the collaborative fiction thing, in a “barebones” version with lots of volunteer work (students?), and in a slightly better padded one. By “calendar implications” I mean, for example, that we need to put up a call for authors very very soon as they will then spend 2-3 weeks in Messina in less than 3 months from today!
I promised Giacomo a couple of paragraphs by the end of this week (he has a meeting with the Europeans on Monday).
we can talk to rethinking economics, an association of economics students and teachers that want to reform the way, and what, economics is taught. I had a longish chat with them, will do a writeup.
We’ve just received their email with the information that our theme is scheduled for the week from 5 to 9 October (we can choose a date). Because this year edition spreads over 3 weeks and not as planned (12-15 October). As well, they confirmed that the Commission, who is the organiser hosting our session, can take in charge travel and 1 night accommodation expenses for up to 2 persons (moderators and/or speakers/exhibitors) per session, even though the sessions will be deployed in a virtual format. I will send more information about it.
Launch in July: call for expressions of interests, call for writers
Write info materials, rules for participation etc.
Writers residency starts in September. But the main difference with BBU is anyone can join in. Comm manager deployed.
Do we allow people to participate in the narrative writing from the start? As in, the resident writer(s) in Messina and the people on the Internet are working simultaneously?
How long does this phase go on for?
How many contributions do we envision?
What kind of coding effort do we expect? This is the part I am worried about financially. @amelia, any brilliant ideas? Few K EUR “mini-scholarship” for a master thesis maybe?
It looks like a great match!
I don’t see much of a role for me, but for what it’s worth: would look more feasible if you could repurpose some materials to start the conversation, from last year or from Babel…
@hugi do you have 40 mins today to help me make a skeletal document with a few numbers in?
The main choice we need to make is whether to “go sequential” or “go parallel”. If we go sequential, we first let the authors write some stuff, then we have the community write some more stuff, then we code. If we go parallel, we aim to having everything happen at the same time.
Parallel is a superior method, but harder to organize as the various activities need to be quite precisely timed.
This is a possible activity plan for going parallel:
July: call for writers in residence
Early August: writer(s) selected
September (7-27): residence happens.
First week is for the writer in residence to get the forum pre-populated.
September 14: forum opens to the community
In the second week the interaction starts, while the project still has the full attention of the author(s).
We are also going to need a couple of paragraphs for the dog-and-pony. I’ll note them here for simplicity of retrieval.
The Sci-Fi Economics Lab: can we imagine a completely different economic system for a low-carbon world?
Economists, politicians and business leaders, it seems, have given up on trying to imagine completely different economic systems. But we have not. And neither has a small group of brainy, visionary science fiction authors: Cory Doctorow (peer production and abundance in Walkaway ), Bruce Sterling (nomads + cheap open source technology + reputation servers in Distraction ), Neal Stephenson (phyla in The Diamond Age ), Cary Neeper (steady state economy in The Webs of Varok), and others.
We organize a meeting of minds where we can learn from each other what future economies might look like. And maybe even how we can help them being born.
The Sci-Fi Economics Lab has the simplest of formats: three talks by a sci-fi author, an economist and a climatologist, followed by a deep Q&A session, with a moderator. The author will be selected through an open call for a writer-in-residence. The economist and the climatologist will be handpicked by the organizing team. Fabrizio Barca, Paola Casavola or Aline Pennisi are a good fit for the economist, Filippo Giorgio is a good fit for the climatologist.
Sci-Fi author: “Fictional economies for the real, post-climate change world that’s coming”. The economic foundation of imaginary worlds in science fiction, and how we can use them in the climate crisis.
Economist: “Economics as a story”. The many fictions underpinning economic theory and economic policy.
Climatologist: “World building with climate change”. Though their motivations are different, both sci-fi authors and economic policy makers have to imagine worlds that differ from the one we have. This talk helps them (and us) to take into account the large, complex shifts brought about by changes in the climate.
And here is some initial thoughts on how to structure the “ethnography of Utopia” work.
The Worldbuilders Academy: an ethnography of utopian/dystopian economic landscapes in science fiction
About
Worldbuilding is the activity of constructing an imaginary world, often for the purpose of acting as the backdrop for a creative endeavor (a book, a film, a video game). Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.
We engage in collaborative worldbuilding for a speculative fiction setting, paying extra attention to the economic behavior, dynamics and institution of the world we build. We adopt an approach that mixes top-down and bottom-up techniques.
One or more professional authors provide, top-down, a general overview of the world, determining broad characteristics such as the world’s inhabitants, technology level, major geographic features, climate, and history. The broad architecture of this world could include different social and economic spaces to provide more diversity and contrast. This is a familiar technique in speculative fiction, from Anarres and Urras in LeGuin’s The dispossessed, to the Hives in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, all the way to Tolkien’s economic geography where the small commerce of the Shire contrasts with the heavy industry of Orthanc.
Anyone can then take part in “filling in”, bottom-up, the inevitably very large gaps. Using the Harry Potter saga as an example, Rowling has invented (top-down) wizarding money. But readers do not know if it is pegged to gold (as suggested by the fact that their cash is minted in precious metals: but then who is to prevent wizards and witches to magic more metal into existence?), or of it is a full fiat currency; the role of the different wizarding currencies in regulating foreign trade, and so forth. This leaves a space for Harry Potter fans to design, bottom-up, their own wizarding equivalent of central banks, the WTO, the IMF, and so on.
World building happens in the context of an online conversation involving the author(s) and anyone who is interested in participating in such exercise. It is hosted on the online forum of the Sci-Fi Economics Lab.
We use the resulting material as the corpus for an online ethnography. To this end, we use a highly scalable methodology called semantic social network analysis. The ethnographic analysis seeks to answer the following questions:
Which features of the economic landscape do people long for? Which ones to they fear and loathe?
Which ones do they consider believable, and why?
In other words, we are researching the real attitudes of participants in the project to fictional economies. Some aspects of the latter might be utopian, other might be dystopian. In this sense, this is an ethnography of utopia/dystopia. Its results might point to pathways to societal change that are potentially beneficial (for example, because they result in lower carbon emission and a slower rate of climate change) and, although radical, they are nevertheless politically achievable because they would be taking people in a world they are longing to live in.
Tentative timeline
July: call for writers in residence
Early August: writer(s) selected
September (7-27): residence happens.
First week is for the writer in residence to get the forum pre-populated.
September 14: forum opens to the community
In the second week the interaction starts, while the project still has the full attention of the author(s).
September 21 or 22: event in Messina.
November: wrap up, presentation of results.
What we have
One or more writers residencies to involve SF authors (care of: FDCM)
Online environment and software stack (care of: Edgeryders)
Community manager to welcome participants through the online forum and keep them involve (care of: Edgeryders).
What we need
The following can be provided skeletally by Edgeryders, but would benefit greatly from some extra resources.
Some communication. This is both to involve more people in the exercise and to get more traction out of the result for future projects, etc.
One or more ethnographer(s) to do the coding and data analysis.
). Also, remember we have a scheduled event for European Regions’ week in Brussels on October 14th.