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 ‘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’."
