Hey everyone! =) Happy to see the convos happening around here!
Still, I feel compelled to look at my own blind spots and I realized this one: have we got a clear plan for the call on the 7th?
More importantly, have we got a call to action to add to that call?
I feel this will be a crucial moment and, judging by the success of the residency call, we can expect some very excited worldbuilders and generally thoughtful people. It would be a shame if we haven’t prepared a button for them to click by the end of our call.
Is there a plan here already? Let’s prepare this structure! =D
Btw, lemme share a vision on how that call could look like. I’m not 100% sure if that’s what we want, but just sharing this here can spark some conversation.
00:05 - small talk and waiting for people to arrive
00:15 - intro about the 'why’s of this project and reminding people they are among their peers, fellow people who also want to build a future together.
00:25 - quick one-on-one connection activity, we give people a prompt question and send them to a breakout room (I’m happy to host something like that)
00:35 - video exhibition, we show we we created (the one I’m gonna put together)
00:55 - Q&A about next steps
01:00 - Invitation for all to join our project (either by joining a mailing list or a Edge Ryders Space)
This call is very community-oriented, making people feel a sense of belonging with others. What do you think?
Hello Joriam, this plan works fairly well. We will adjust the times (in particular of the breakout rooms) when we see the interest and the possible number of the participants.
It could be interesting presenting the stage with you and @alberto giving a brief description of the project and the associations behind it and then introduce @yudhanjaya who will present the concept note and the points we have reached then.
I agree. To get the most out of this, the scene should be set somehow. I think the session would be most interesting and generative if there were some boundaries around it. In the best of worlds we would have a presentation of the concept note, followed by breakout groups - but this may be premature. What do you think @yudhanjaya and @alberto?
There is a lot of buzz around this session. Within a day of posting about it, quite a lot of people from my network have signed up and have really interesting contributions. How do we make sure that we deliver on the promise that they will get to discuss those contributions? How will we collect the contributions and keep the buzz going? This feels like your domain @Joriam - and I would be more than happy to help facilitate.
I’m right there with you, @hugi I think sending them to breakouts to get to grips with the themes is the best thing we can do — they all agreed to the same invitation after all, it’s a tight little community.
From my side, I also got quite a few writers excited to join!
Now for the ‘buzz going’ side of things, this is what I came here to ask about and make sure we’ll have.
Here’s my thinking, there’s not enough time to create the ideal solution, which would be a fully formed wiki with previous content and clear interaction rules, also including a community space where people could meet and discuss.
But that’s cool. We can be transparent about it. We can say we haven’t had the time to prepare this yet because of corona and how the initial plans shifted. I’m sure we’ll find forgiveness there.
What would be an absolute shame would be if people didn’t have one centralized button to click at the end of the call. That can be signing up to a newsletter or joining an EdgeRyders board or joining a slack channel or a discord server. Any would do, but none would not do (though I’ll admit I’d rather start with something that doesn’t require community management. I don’t feel we have enough resources for that, it’s very time consuming).
I’d rather focus my attention in the introductory video I’m gonna make in the next few days, but I really didn’t want that “one single button” ball dropped.
Luckily, that will already be taken care of for most participants. Participant registration to the webinar through the form automatically lead to a user being created on Edgeryders and their registration being posted on their behalf in this thread.
We can very easily create another form that posts post-webinar evaluations and ideas. Anyone who is in the webinar without having registered through the form can then get their Edgeryders account by filling out that form instead - leaving all but their email address empty if they simply want to be kept in the loop.
It is very easy for us to them round up all those users and email them, or tag them in subsequent threads.
Oh @hugi I didn’t realise they had to register! That’s perfect!
From this point on, when we want to engage this audience, we can just do it in this new space, right? (I’m assuming we can send an email notification for important memos)
What I imagine is next year (perhaps even starting this year) start a round of small engagements, like giving a prompt and asking people to chime in — all in preparation to the release of the wiki.
But of course, I’d need a place for those to happen. I’m guessing I can count on SciFiEconomics space for that. Or do you think we should create an open Worldbuilding Academy space just so we don’t mix things over there @alberto@nadia@IvanC ?
Anyway, one decision or another, my question here has been answered!
Yes, exactly. I go through the signup thread every once in a while – the amount of intellectual firepower is quite impressive already. I think we should probably think about preparing ways for the most impressive people, the volunteers we can not afford to miss, something more engaging than “sign up for updates, we’ll be in touch at the and of January”. Any ideas?
Yes. I don’t think we need a separate space for now. If it “blows up” and suddenly we do, thanks to the amazing admin tools on Discourse it is super-easy to create a new category and move the relevant threads to it. All permalinks are unchanged when you do that, nothing breaks.
IMO, the most important thing in that call is to screen who are we talking to and who could (and would) we include in the following steps.
So, yes, we should have a coordination call. We should prepare some ideas for it.
Usually we schedule a test call the day before to also test the link. @alberto and @nadia plus @yudhanjaya should be present too along with @MariaEuler, @bojanbobic and co.
This could be our appointment this time too but if you feel there are things to discuss before that, I will gladly organise another one.
Two thoughts;
Judging from the sole amount of comments, the breakout rooms to understand well who do we have in front us are necessary. We should have ER people in all of them.
In the meantime, we should definitely work on what @alberto said:
On my side, I am working on a document on the SciFi Economics Lab work and could produce quality content to use as a conversation opener in the follow up.
That is important. But it is also important to live up to expectations - and based on what we chose as our prompt, people will likely come ready to be creative. Some might even have thought a lot about the task at hand. What will be important is that these people feel that their time is not wasted and that they are truly invited to participate in the call, in a way that actually has a chance to influence the outcome. Otherwise, we might know who was on the call, but they might no longer be very interested. So we need to think about how to achieve that.
While by no means a ‘how-to’ or a complete list of ‘this is what we want’, this iceberg is often useful for creating fictional worlds (and quite a few high fantasy writers I know refer to it, including Brandon Sanderson in his lectures). It’s a good look at the components that go into creating believable cultures: the top can be interpreted as the space that readers interact with in the course of a story and the bottom as the stuff that serves as the foundation (ie: worldbuilding).
Do send an invite for Thursday. I’d like to see if we can incorporate a short poll as well, to see if we can get people to click through and tell us what they most expect to see / use this for.
Half thought thought: One way in which Edgeryders as a corpus contributes to culture building in this sense is the tagging of contents in different discussion…and using the semantic social networks generated to find the “hidden” connections between them in the new world that is already in the making, but not visible yet. Could it be an enabler of contributing to the world building if we make it some kind of sentient entity @hugi? Or a machine or sorts that we have some class of archiver/ synthesist/oracle worker/historian tribes wielding as a powerbroker/ moneymaker? I’m thinking about that Italian minister who kept that archive that he then gave to the church @alberto? The one that had that cat or rabbit- remember which one?
Because there are a lot of topics that remind me of what I see in the iceberg illustration here What We Care About
I really like this idea. If I put my data scientist hat on, I can almost see how a knowledge graph like this might be built . . .say we assume that all language is a way of denoting concepts and the relationships between them (Russell’s thesis). Say take a symbol-set that represents most concepts in the known universe in a social graph structure (a thesaurus is a perfect pre-built example). Then say we use topic modelling (linear discriminant analysis might be the perfect x between computational cheapness, robustness and explainability) and attach topic-tags to documents, and then those tags get attached to their corresponding term from the thesaurus. I know it sounds weird, but what it turns into is knowledge graph. The libraries needed for the base functionality are in Python and R. Centrality of a topic and associated documents would be judged by how many ‘social links’ they form to other topics and documents.
Can we stick this function into the state machine and the associated field of aethnography? That we we could give aethnographers like Kosovitch high levels of access and a whole academic field there dealing in narratives from hidden connections.
