Process map #2 - generating protocol

Just in case anyone wonders what we actually do, the unMonastarians continue their labours to distill an understanding for the core direction of their work. The latest development may prove promising; we address a key concern – the creation of Protocol


Katalin the Worldly has been quietly having her visions again.  These sparkling bubbles seem at this early date to mark a major return to a latent thread, and must be preserved for posterity.  Fortunately our documentation skills have not been forgotten and a path is traceable.  Henceforth, the prep for the preSummit will involve considerable house cleaning in the more dormant piles of dropped ideas.  Please join in
  We return to designing the game


Negotiating control

"Why is it so difficult to write the Protocol?  Why is it even difficult to write a (lower case) protocol,

or admit we adhere, in theory if not practice, to some basic rules?


Articulating a code with the purpose of enforcement violates deeply held values such as:

  • everyone knows what is best for them
  • one cannot speak for someone else
  • one needs to make one’s own decisions
  • freedom is primarily a freedom from an externally imposed structure
  • making someone do something is wrong

I actually agree with all of these. I also think that we need a protocol, and the protocol’s hidden assumptions are the following:

  • abiding to a collectively accepted set of rules is better for each individual than making their own decisions
  • it is not necessary to discuss everything all the time
  • reducing the number of decisions to be made is a gift from the community to the individual
  • freedom is primarily freedom to act within a structure that equally serves others
  • commonly held  and enforced expectations help overcome personal weakness and fear

The question is, how can we guard the territory that falls under the first set of assumptions, while clearly demarcate a region of unMonastery life that is defined by the protocol, guided by these hidden assumptions? We need to dissect these territories, identify OOs for the protocol, and create a system in which there is always a way to retreat into set A if set B oversteps one’s boundaries. (one can always leave / put on the invisibility hat / call a crisis circle / appeal to unInquisition / go running)

(-- perhaps what is at issue, and this is TOP SECRET, is that each of us needs to make their own protocol for it to have any personal resonance.  This is unlikely to be viable, because among the virtues of the individual, which you so nimbly listed above, is the profound modern right to change ones mind ( a rampant absurdity ), so that our flexibility in rewriting protocol to serve the desires of the moment, quickly flattens any perceivable virtue. – BD.)

Scriptorium, The Library and The Initiation.

I did not simply envision how this will all be, but found the technical foundation to do it.

The difference between (the content of unMonastery slack channels ) Discourse and Library also elegantly navigates the two contradictory forces that disables us:    the work /  and the Work. It also exposes the impossibility of the Athens position (not the unMon):  the work (setting up the apartment) will never transform into the Work unless everything is documented and reflected upon. It is the same for every working group, conversation, etc. – the documentation being the contemplation. This is the ultimate cohesive force between the Engineers and the Artists.  Documentation is essential in laboratory and prototyping, so everyone understands that at each point we need language - a Protocol of the Work.

(I know of a useful book here, so miraculously, we are in much better shape than it feels like.)

“The amount of work we are doing is unprecedented even in my workoholic existence.”

We keep forgetting that what we need about the protocol is two things:  protocol, specific rules for a community, self-designed based on previous examples and Protocol, which is a Process Map for the WE and needs to be meta.  

We cannot write a protocol because we don’t have an unMonastery - when we open someplace, a protocol for each specific unMonastery should be written after 6 months in the form of a well documented  â€˜Protocol Summit’.  But for Protocol we need to take another look  at the Game Board #2.  What Nottingham did for the Pre-Mon, we must do for unMon:  making a detailed process map of the WE.

(– Maybe – I’d suggest that entering an unMon without a Protocol is treacherous
   Get it on-line and fill in the blanks with rules and unrules on a provisional basis prior to moving in.)

I disagree about starting unMons with protocol. What we need to give instead is a Process Map with clear timeline which NAMES PROTOCOL AS AN OBTAINABLE OBJECTIVE:  the Process Map of the WE –

Stakeholders Handbook Vol. 2. /  Understanding the We.

Create an abstract structure, now we can use the game experiences, first week: how to make decisions; second, kitchen (food sources, schedules, set up food analytics).

We will have to put the two on the same board, as you suggested at the beginning, like the Toyota logo, because it is only Top-Down unMons like Matera was that open without a weird limbo period that is happening in Athens right now. Although we have proposed that the strength of the unMon is that it travelled on its work – this may be naive – it is the We that is visible, contagious and that which converts to Work.  It is the in-house labour that transmits and transforms the We as our core offering.











( – That everything goes back into the process is the wonder here.  Can we do something about the website text ? - it is so jejeune.  I sent a friend there yesterday, and then realised I was offering him next to nothing.)


This actually solves also that problem:

The website simply offers 3 options:  go see our work–> Discourse;  go see our Work –> Library (with curated interface offering bits of BoM, latest medium publ, etc);  go see our press pack –> current website.

I see it elegantly falling into place.  We can write a Org Structure document as protocol for Discourse, and we have to write a Protocol for producing all the documents  - BoM, Stakeholders, protocol, which is the users manual for the second game and ‘process map of the we’."

Sorry; I couldn’t get the image up. i’ll try again here as a cumbersome appendage
Ola Möller's stylish mock-up of the classic unMonasterian board.

Interesting

I like the tension in the “negotiating control” paragraph. Maybe Benedict and the others enjoyed an advantage there: they lived in chaotic, Hobbesian societies where “freedom” was predominantly the freedom of the strong to overcome the weak. So, monks were only happy to give themselves to the “relative peace” (as Father Cassian called it) of the Rule, without too much tension.

I have been thinking about Protocol a lot, and I have a tentative one that consists of only three chapters! Quite elegant, really. But I will mull over it for a while longer, I am not completely sure it makes sense and it’s not like it’s urgent.

Your image does not show because (ehm) you are using a proprietary platform, so the platform decides who can see your content, when and from where. It won’t show on Edgeryders, and when I tried to access it from the browser (https://slack-files.com/T038P4KLE-F044VM8UK-5cfe198df9) I got the message “Access to this file has expired”. It seems you are surrounded by protocols, Bembo, and very little of it was written to serve you or the causes you are loyal to. Score one for FLOSS,

ah Alberto:

It seems that i struggle at every turn on the Platform.  I am now looking around for the Confessional as i am informed that it has come to life.  It doesn’t appear as recent activity, so I am quite lost.  Digging, I found this; in the old days i would have been informed of your comment: Alas, now I am no longer kept up to date in these matters either.   Think that I could have missed your big news


It thrills me to hear that you have been working away on protocol: are you carving in stone or wood?  I cannot say that I have given up, but each time I seem to get caught in precisely the personal freedom meme that Katalin elucidates.  I have postulated a protocol generator and proposed a genuine settings interface were choices are selected.  Oddly, every attempt to impose what I instinctively consider minimal discipline falls afoul of the young and flexible.  I am left to follow them around with my handy broom while trying not to show my grumpiness.

Bembo :slight_smile:

The platform works (or doesn’t, depending on how you see it) as usual. As per Ben’s suggestions, the Confessional was set up as a closed group to ensure safety; members have to be individually approved. For this reason, non-members do not see the notifications from its updates the way they see notifications from fully open projects. Almost all projects on Edgeryders are fully open.

I am not carving at all! Everything is written on water. It works like this: when I go running, my mind wanders. Recently, in Rome (I was running along the Appia Antica, on a road that must not have looked that different in the time of Emperor Hadrian) the three rules that had been floating in my head came together into a sort of structure. From then on, I have been poking holes in that structure, then plugging them. They already have one user: me. This version of protocol is, tentatively, how I myself want to live. Just like Benedict’s Rule, it is not always easy to conform.

For what it is worth, it sounds like the role of individual freedom in the discussion you mention could be downplayed a bit. The reason is this: the unMonastery does not have any cohercive power, so that there is no need to fear its cohercion (neither does the monastery). It’s a bit like being married: when you tie the knot, you assume certain duties and responsibilities towards your beloved – and yes, they do limit your personal freedom. But in the end, no one can make you be a good spouse if you don’t want to – and if you find them impossible to follow, you will divorce or run away. Both divorce and escape act are expensive, so you will likely ponder them before you execute them. In other words, those duties are there to protect you from occasional straying, not to straitjacket you into a life impossible for who you are: this would be not only cruel, but impossible.

Delivered

@Bembo_Davies, I finally managed to put my thoughts in order and commit them to database. For all its faults and limited scope, Protocol 0.1 is here.

For what it’s worth, I think some of the difficulties you recorded might come from trying to use Protocol to make decisions that are too specific, like “how to decide who shall wash the dishes when?”. After talking with @katalin, who seems to think unMonastery Athens defaulted to a bunch of people sharing an apartment (which is great by the way – we do it ourselves), I formed the hypothesis that people – rightly – will by default resist constraining rules. What Protocol does, rather than dictate, is emphasise interdependence and mutual responsibility. You must be made free to take initiatives towards the common good, even, and especially, experimental ones. You must be made the judge of what “the common good” means. And you must acknowledge and welcome others and your mutual interdependence from them, as well as their own freedom and responsibility.

Most conversations I have had seem to agree on this. Where we depart is mostly in that I emphasise interdependence from future and potential brethren, whereas most Matera veterans draw a line at the House and at the people who they can speak to over breakfast. The departure is not trivial: it means I think of brethren as a network, which have no in-out borders but rather a gradient of centrality; and you think of brethren-ness as a category, you are either in or out. Furthermore, it means I think of “being an unMonasterian” as an identity, whereas I think of it as a behaviour. For me it’s just that I do not like to stick labels on people, because ontology is overrated.