Regarding our community master class. Here is the short summary Noemi wrote awhile back.
“Building healthy and productive online-offline communities: Community building is a relationship business. How do you make a credible value proposition to the people you are trying to engage? A hands on, co-design session dedicated to setting up the first OpenVillage MENA space.”
I have been putting together a new set of slides for this. It is not an online management class, though I do have that also and can present it if and when needed. In the spirit of the summary above, and thinking about the “hands-on, co-design” aspect that is the core of it, I have so far largely framed my approach posing a number of questions that the co-designers will need to consider.
Do we want to come away with some sort of structure, or agreed-upon basis for how it will be self-governed and how it will actually be managed? I’m not looking to make a rule book and I don’t think that would work anyway. If we set a few parameters I think we will improve the odds of a smoother experience.
On the other hand, we can just set up the space, trust everyone there will figure it out, tell everyone to work hard, share and don’t be an asshole and let it happen more spontaneously. There is a continuum in a sense where you had a pretty tight monastery-like arrangement like the Farm all the way to the open land experiments of Morningstar Ranch and Drop City. We fall in between there, but I am still getting a bearing on where we fall along that line. And where we of ER, Inc. are, and where a MENA Reef will be. They will all differ in some ways from each other and from us. And for me, they differ from my own frame
of references enough that I try to picture how this thing is really going to play out and try to make my input directly relevant to what is actually taking place.